* IT managers and CFOs can make the most of their scarce budgets with Evident Software
Chief financial officers and enterprise IT managers looking to make the most out of scarce budget dollars might want to take a look at Evident Software.
The company, formerly called Apogee Networks, recently raised about $7 million in venture capital funding for its usage-based take on IT. Company executives say Evident’s flagship product, Evident Enterprise Edition, identifies millions of dollars of hidden costs and enables IT departments to manage resources more effectively.
“We help companies get a picture of what it costs to deliver their IP services,” Evident CEO Roger Boyce says. The company evolved the technology, with some of the IT chargeback features that Apogee Networks focused on, to create a cost model of specific applications and end users, he says.
The software resides on Microsoft Windows or Sun Solaris servers and collects application flows, or conversation data, from a variety of network probes, devices, servers and end users. Evident uses a distributed model and recommends users install its software on servers across networks and in data centers. A centralized server collects the data from distributed servers and acts as an administration console for IT managers.
“We come in and spy on the communications between the servers and the users. We capture every IP conversation,” says Saul Einbinder, Evident vice president of strategy. The software then performs an analysis of the data captured and determines if enterprise applications such as SAP or PeopleSoft are being used cost-effectively.
This approach uses the end-to-end conversation data as a way to measure enterprise service and application utilization. The collected data is aggregated at each step by downstream collection servers which results in a true end-to-end conversation view of all the transactions between an end-user and enterprise application servers located throughout the enterprise. In a dynamic IP address environment, IP addresses are optionally correlated to their host names on a real-time basis. The conversation data is stored in an enterprise data store.
“We do not look to manage IT resources or their performance. We are showing the financial executives where their money is going in IT and how it can be put to better use,” Boyce adds.
Evident Enterprise Edition can show, say, if an application is authenticating users over and over again, based on the communications protocol. The repetitive actions could consume bandwidth on the net, waste end-user time and tie up those resources from being distributed to other end users. By reconfiguring the application to properly authenticate users, network managers can free up that bandwidth and end users would get better response times.
Another example would be if software showed that a large implementation of SAP just wasn’t being used enough to justify its cost. And Evident could potentially identify areas where an application could be scaled back significantly to touch just a few mission-critical points and eliminate multiple high licensing and maintenance fees.
“Evident optimizes an enterprise’s investment in IT,” Boyce says. “And we think this is a great enable for utility computing. You need to know the demand and how resources are being used to adjust to an on-demand model.”
With about 20 customers and the recent funding, Evident plans to announce a new version of the software in October. The company targets Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprise companies. Pricing for the software begins around $125,000 or $150,000.
