Priceline.com, the Web-based “name your price” travel services company, can’t tolerate network downtime. The company depends upon 500 Microsoft Windows NT and Unix servers to support its applications, which when down can cost the company about $50,000 an hour.

According to Priceline CIO Ron Rose, the company is looking for a tool to speed up identifying problems and applying fixes. With application management software in place, he says he needs a way to optimize the tools Priceline already uses. He says he wants to optimize and extend his management arsenal to better monitor applications across multiple platforms.

“We want to come up with a consistent way to add rational alerting across different platforms. We need to add a higher level of intelligence to our current alerting,” Rose says.

Priceline has yet to deploy Netuitive Analytics 2.0, but Rose’s IT team is “playing with it” because, he says, “the statistical analysis they provide will eventually roll up the alerts from BMC and NetIQ across platforms. It could increase the span of control of our administrators because they would have better information about what’s different in the environment.”

Rose adds that the software could eliminate manual analysis and more quickly identify crucial data for systems administrators. “It’s a tool that creates the ability to detect what’s different, and that’s a very important question to answer,” he says.

Netuitive in June announced Version 2.0 of its flagship software. The company says it extends and optimizes the capabilities of application performance management software such as BMC Patrol and NetIQ AppManager. Netuitive Analytics can arm network managers with more efficient threshold management, early warning of performance degradation or failures and faster problem diagnosis, the company says.

The software works with existing agents on an enterprise network to analyze and correlate data to generate combined, interpreted alerts, which Netuitive calls “Trusted Alarms.” The latest version of the software lets administrators know when an alert requires immediate attention by using its statistical analysis to distinguish normal behavior from when something has gone wrong.

The company says it can lower costs because Netuitive Analytics 2.0 minimizes the need for labor-intensive thresholds and reduces the need for administrators to respond to false alerts. Netuitive also says the software can improve an IT department’s mean time to repair problems by optimizing their current application performance management deployments (BMC Patrol and NetIQ AppManager included now) and providing faster diagnosis and accurate performance measures.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.