Application performance company Precise has launched the first major new release of its transaction performance management (TPM) application since spinning off from Symantec last year.

Mark Kremer, chief executive at Precise, explained that the world is rapidly turning to automated financial transactions, covering everything from online shopping and banking, to self-service airport check-in and grocery shopping.

Flawless and super-fast transactions are becoming increasingly important for a company to maintain its brand perception, according to the firm, as slow performance or a single outage can send customers elsewhere.

Unfortunately, as these systems become more intelligent and widespread, the complexity increases and any problems that arise become more difficult to locate and fix, said Kremer.

Precise promises to ease these problems by guiding database administrators and IT managers to the source of any conflict, even if it comes from tiers much further up in the transaction chain. The tool will also highlight the impact of any optimisation done on one part of the system on other parts.

Precise 8.5 extends to the latest developments in the storage tier, managing transaction performance for composite applications and offering the first performance management solution for DB2 environments.

"We have worked closely with our customers around the globe during the last year. With the economic downturn we have seen them shift from building new infrastructure to making what they already have work better," said Kremer.

"Our customers tell us that they look to TPM to help them provide the same or better levels of service at significantly lower costs."

The software also includes new centralised administration and automated deployment capabilities that allow smaller, less experienced teams to effectively manage large deployments. This is vital during this economic downturn, according to Kremer, as IT teams are reduced but demands are higher than ever.

"Before, people ended up with 30 tools to deal with 30 problems and 30 experts to manage them," he said. "Today that model is simply not viable and, although it's a very airy phrase, people really do have to do more with less."

As Precise was spun out from Symantec's Application Performance Management (APM) team, Symantec has announced it is ending its line of APM products.

Precise is offering a migration path for Symantec APM customers, including a simple switch to an equivalent licence, ongoing support and the option of upgrading to Precise 8.5.