One year after becoming an independent company (again), Precise has unveiled a new version of its application performance management software.

Precise’s Transaction Performance Management technology is designed to help companies prevent application performance problems. It monitors a company’s infrastructure for potential slowdowns, alerts IT to any transaction hiccups, and can offer potential remedies to common problems with packaged applications such as SAP and Oracle as well as custom applications (J2EE, .NET), databases and storage devices.

“Transaction performance management is about managing and optimizing the transaction flow through all the tiers,” says Mark Kremer, CEO at Precise. “It’s the ability to track transactions across tiers, dive deep into a problem spot within the context of a transaction, and solve the problem with a good MTTR [mean time to repair].”

New to Precise 8.5 are performance management functions that extend all the way to the storage tier. “Unless you are transaction-aware, and you can see the different flows [to storage devices], and can make sure that they don’t congest at one point, you can’t manage the performance of your transaction,” Kremer says. “That’s what we do well in version 8.5.”

The upgrade also includes tools for managing transaction performance for composite applications, as well as capabilities tuned for DB2 environments. On the management front, centralized administration and automated deployment capabilities are designed to allow smaller, less experienced teams to more easily manage large deployments, Kremer says.

Precise also is offering a migration path to users of Symantec APM, which is approaching end-of-life. With Precise’s new program, Symantec APM customers can migrate their licenses to an equivalent Precise TPM license and existing Symantec APM customers can receive ongoing support from Precise without a rate hike, Kremer says.

The migration option is a logical path for Symantec APM users to consider, given that Symantec is Precise’s former parent company -- and Precise 8.5 is the follow-on release to Symantec APM.

Veritas purchased Precise in 2003, and Symantec purchased Veritas in 2005. Then in March of last year, Symantec’s Precise business was acquired by private equity firm Vector Capital with help from Greylock Partners. Precise re-launched itself as an independent company in the fall of last year.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.