* Where Compuware shines
Compuware has been quietly innovating – with acquisitions, such as DevStream for Java 2 Enterprise Edition performance analysis, and with partnerships, such as with Collation for discovery and support for the creation of a configuration management database. Compuware has grown a portfolio balanced across mainframe and distributed application management, application development and application performance management in production environments, and cross-infrastructure support with its Vantage suite.
The Vantage suite looks at application flows across the full infrastructure, with drill-down into application impact and usage on the one hand and individual transaction performance and thread analysis on the other. Moreover, Compuware can perform “what if” scenarios in testing and evaluating application service performance over the distributed infrastructure.
Compuware had been hampered over the last six years by the strains of integrating innovative but resource-demanding acquisitions, such as Optimal Networks, which largely contributed to the Application Vantage product, and CACI, which supported software development over distributed networks. The result was a functionally rich but fragmented and hard-to-deploy set of management options. Software costs, when customization was included, were also an issue for many buyers. But Compuware recognized this and put a full-court press on streamlining its portfolio for better integration while embracing new technologies.
But within Compuware’s already rich set of functionality there lies a treasure that is still buried – and that’s application service metering.
Compuware’s Vantage suite can assess an application service’s resource demands across the network infrastructure in terms of bandwidth, servers and databases. It is granular (in terms of time of day) in its metering and can automate consumption patterns based on geography and client (line of business) across specific services. Compuware has even introduced some cost-allocation reports that provide a percentage breakdown against dollar totals for application services vis-à-vis specific organizations consuming the resources.
Why is this important? What I believe we’re seeing in the industry right now is a trend bringing asset management and service management together. All the attention to ITIL’s configuration management database is part of this – a structural approach to enable the management and planning of services as accountable assets.
This makes sense if you believe, as I do, that IT must learn to deliver services as “accountable products” to its business constituents. Whether actual bills exchange hands is less of an ultimate measure than being able to see the data behind a bill, real or virtual, in order to plan future services, optimize infrastructure, and detect destructive patterns of application use (such as downloading music from the Internet during work hours).
Here’s where Compuware may well have a sweet spot. It has significant sophistication in the way it gathers information about service performance. And it has granularity in the way it meters service usage across the full infrastructure – from data center to wide area network. It is one of a small handful of vendors to have this capability.
As the strengths of its integrated Vantage suite emerge, Compuware will have the potential to become a true industry leader in addressing this confluence of performance and consumption. Some of its customers are already deploying the metering in support of chargeback systems developed in-house, and are trying to nudge Compuware a little further in its appreciation of the power of this combination.
It will be interesting to watch Compuware in the coming months – and, I suppose, years – as the industry comes to recognize service and asset management as an integrated continuum. And while asset management in itself has not been an area of focus for Compuware (and is hence a natural place for partnership), service metering takes it significantly closer. After all, service metering is probably where asset management and service management most conspicuously join to document the full dynamic of the infrastructure as a performing business investment.
