Cisco invests in OpTier

Cisco puts undisclosed amount into OpTier's business transaction management software

OpTier Monday said Cisco had invested an undisclosed amount to help the company continue to deliver business transaction management software.

OpTier, which in June received $15 million in a third round of funding, says Cisco strategic funds will help accelerate its ability to offer services for managing networks and data centers. OpTier's flagship CoreFirst software relies on automation to quickly detect application and business service performance problems in heterogeneous environments.

Industry watchers say technology that can pinpoint the source of problems across sophisticated networks and applications will become more critical to IT buyers going forward.

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OpTier Monday said Cisco had invested an undisclosed amount to help the company continue to deliver business transaction management software.

OpTier, which in June received $15 million in a third round of funding, says Cisco strategic funds will help accelerate its ability to offer services for managing networks and data centers. OpTier's flagship CoreFirst software relies on automation to quickly detect application and business service performance problems in heterogeneous environments.

Industry watchers say technology that can pinpoint the source of problems across sophisticated networks and applications will become more critical to IT buyers going forward.

"The convergence of network management and application management has become a central market imperative. Application transactions visibility is a key element of this convergence, conveying the context of business activities as they traverse servers and networks," said Will Cappelli, research vice president at Gartner, during a presentation titled “Managing Applications in the Age of SOA and Web Services” at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit in June.

OpTier says its technology is equipped to address such complexity and help IT managers prevent performance issues from degrading business services. CoreFirst requires IT managers to install a central data repository on a dedicated server and to distribute agents on managed Web, database and application servers. IT managers must set the policies they want the software to use via a Web-based interface, which also serves as a management interface and reporting tool. Once deployed, CoreFirst discovers how applications traverse the network and use the managed devices, and the agents monitor the transaction workloads on the servers.

“Meeting service-level goals requires a new approach to managing the IT infrastructure where data centers, network resources and applications are intricately and dynamically linked. The collaboration between Cisco and OpTier will allow customers to optimize their entire infrastructure to meet business needs through a unified business transaction view across servers and network tiers,” said Israel Mazin, CEO & Chairman of the Board at OpTier, said in a company press release.

Cisco's investment adds to OpTier's $15 million third round of funding from Gemini Israel Funds and existing investors Pitango Venture Capital, Carmel Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company had garnered more than $25 million in its two previous rounds of $16 million and about $9.5 million.

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.