Compuware sets sights on IT rationalisation

Compuware is offering a combined service management solution with Vantage 11

Compuware has launched a new version of its Vantage IT and business service management product aimed at delivering end-to-end IT performance visibility.

Vantage 11 combines all of Compuware's existing point monitoring products developed in-house or through acquisitions, such as Vantage Server or Vantage Networks, into one product.

Michael Allen, EMEA director of IT and business service management solutions at Compuware, explained that Vantage 11 had been the longest development project the company had undertaken, and would meet current market drivers head on.

"Many early adopters of business service management had a vision of building it out through the integration of components, but failed to get value from their deployments," he said. "They were essentially dashboards with all the connecting wires still hanging out at the bottom."

Allen added that, with the release of Vantage 11, enterprises looking to drive cost and complexity out of their IT infrastructures and management would find one toolset to replace disparate, legacy IT monitoring and management products.

Vantage 11 integrates an automated, performance-driven service model to reflect growing enterprise adoption of management and development methodologies, like IT Infrastructure Library and Six Sigma, alongside end-user experience monitoring, the firm said.

It offers top-down role-based reporting capabilities, along with application analytics to drill down to the root cause of a performance issue, regardless of Java or .NET architectures or diverse types of third-party monitoring data feeds, according to the company.

"Despite the fact that we are predicting an overall decline in enterprise IT software spending this year because of the recession, we still expect the market for IT and business service management [and related technologies] to grow by 9.5 per cent in 2009 alone," said Dr Thomas Mendel, vice president and research director at Forrester Research.

The analyst added that this demand stemmed from the growing adoption of diverse application delivery models, including cloud computing and software-as-a-service, as well as a trend towards cheaper and more predictable virtual application infrastructures.

As a result, Allen said that Vantage 11 has been designed to take an integrated, holistic view of the performance of every IT component of an end-to-end business process to ensure that application performance is maximised for the end user.