Blazent identifies the underutilized

A San Mateo, Calif., start-up says it can help enterprise companies find wasted dollars in their IT infrastructures and help them avoid making unnecessary purchases.

Blazent develops what it calls IT intelligence software to help inventory assets, identify underutilized resources and show IT managers how they can cut costs and improve efficiencies on their nets. President and CEO Gary Oliver says too many enterprise companies invest in software and services without fully realizing their potential.

“Many organizations are in a stage of chaos, with IT inventory in multiple departments and no real way to assess what they have or how it’s used,” Oliver says. In fact, according to research firm Gartner, as much as 20% – or $540 billion of the total $2.7 trillion spent annually on IT – is inadvertently wasted.

Blazent proposes to eliminate some of the waste. It uses a central data warehouse to get asset data from distributed servers. Users can administer the Blazent software and access reports via a command-line and Web-based interface.

Blazent 2.0 analyzes a range of technology resources, collecting data through discovery processes, agents and data integration with third-party tools. It supports Windows on the desktop and Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, HP-UX and Red Hat Linux on servers.

The software gathers information about all packaged and custom software applications installed in customer environments, and assembles detailed profiles of hardware resources, including manufacturer, CPU, memory, storage, peripheral devices and more.

Blazent 2.0 also integrates existing IT asset management, contract and financial information with the IT infrastructure information in the Blazent Intelligence Platform (centralized server software with a data warehouse) for analysis by Blazent Analytics. This allows customers to leverage existing data and avoid duplicate data collection efforts.

Blazent, formerly Cohesiant, was founded in the fall of 2000 and this week will announce it has closed $10 million in a third round of funding, bringing its total funding to $23 million.

Competing in some areas with the likes of IBM Tivoli and Computer Associates, Blazent says it will complement existing management tools. “We are looking to optimize what people already have, help them make better use of their assets,” Oliver says.

Blazent offers products for software, servers, PCs, migration and outsourcing optimization. Pricing varies and product deployment can take up to two months.