HP Upgrades SOA Quality and Management Software
HP has introduced new and enhanced quality and management software to help companies in deployment of service-oriented architectures (SOAs). The products are intended to accelerate enterprise SOA adoption by providing assurances that services meet or exceed design and operational specifications. Integrating these solutions across the service lifecycle of planning, quality and operations helps assure that SOA-based services can be relied upon to support critical business applications without risk of failure or performance degradation, according to HP.
HP's Quality Management solutions for SOA "handle everything from an SOA perspective from the actual testing of services to the management of the overall quality objectives," Kelly Emo, SOA product marketing manager at HP Software, told 5 Minute Briefing. HP Service Test Management 9.3 enables quality assurance teams to plan and execute quality management activities from a service-oriented perspective. It enables teams to report on the pre-production quality of SOA-based services, and also integrates with HP SOA Systinet to use quality management metrics to alert managers and users that services are ready for consumption. HP Service Test 9.12 enables functional testing of SOA services to reduce the risk of application failures. Testing is integrated with HP's extended software portfolio.
HP's SOA Management solutions "are focused not so much at the quality assurance organization but they are actually focused at production operations," said Emo. Once services are out in production and running, the solutions “give the IT organization, the help desk, and then the back-end support teams the ability to monitor and manage the behavior of those services and ensure that they meet their service level agreements."
The SOA Management solutions include HP Business Availability Center (BAC) for SOA, a module of HP's real-time business service and application management solution built for the challenges of SOA; HP Diagnostics for SOA, intended to allow technical SOA teams to drill down into the behavior of their shared services to quickly identify and resolve problems before they impact customers; and HP SOA Policy Enforcer, intended to bridge the gap between operational SOA management and runtime SOA governance. The solutions provide the assurance that services are meeting technical and business requirements by monitoring and enforcing security, performance and other operational requirements, HP said. Performance monitoring data is fed directly into HP Diagnostics for SOA for analysis.
These enhancements support “all of the environments that customers need for runtime SOA, giving them the right views and the right reporting and the right capabilities" to understand not just the services, but also the consumer relationships as well, said Emo. More information about the HP SOA portfolio is available here.
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Tidal Software Announces New Product for IT Operations Intelligence
Tidal Software, a provider of application scheduling and performance management software, introduced Tidal Intelligent Reporting for Enterprise Scheduler, designed to provide insight into the functioning of enterprise job scheduling environments. Analysis provided by Tidal Intelligent Reporting is intended to enable IT operations and business personnel to make the fast decisions necessary to troubleshoot, trend, and analyze job scheduling operations and business utilization of the IT production environment.
The product offers organizations more than just reporting on the raw data, Rod Butters, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Tidal Software, told 5 Minute Briefing. "It actually gives them a data warehouse or business intelligence type of view into the operational data for their scheduler," he said.
In many environments today, job scheduling automates both key business and data center operational processes, said Butters. "For example, we have people using our job scheduler today to orchestrate their entire extract, transform, load process to create their business intelligence warehouse for the entire business." These customers require a very in-depth view that shows how effectively their job scheduling environments are meeting business needs as well as managing data center resources, he noted.
Tidal Intelligent Reporting offers about two dozen ready-to-run reports for visibility and ROI, the vendor said. Users can look for opportunities to increase individual job performance, improve overall job schedule coordination, and target operational issues. These reports also offer information that can help support and streamline the processes for auditing and compliance, provide insight into business utilization and activity data, and account for system usage to manage charge back, according to the company.
"These pre-defined reports can be customized," Wayne Greene, senior director of product management at Tidal Software, noted. "We also have what we are calling an ‘ad hoc editor’ as well, where someone in operations or a business user who 'owns' the business intelligence solution - or owns SAP or PeopleSoft jobs scheduling - can quickly pull a specific report on a specific time-frame and delve more deeply into what is going on."
Ready-to-run, custom, and ad hoc reports can be scheduled to run and be automatically delivered to users. Reports can be accessed and viewed online via a browser, in print via PDF, or downloaded into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or Word document. The tool also enables fine-grained authorization, segregating specific reports and views according to business units, applications, and management levels.
Tidal Intelligent Reporting for Enterprise Scheduler supports version 5.3 and higher of Tidal Enterprise Scheduler. For more information, go here.
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Micro Focus to Acquire NetManage
Micro Focus International plc, a provider of enterprise application management and modernization solutions, and NetManage, a legacy to Web vendor, announced that their boards of directors have unanimously approved, and both companies have signed, a definitive agreement for Micro Focus to acquire NetManage in a merger transaction. The acquisition is expected to be completed in June 2008.
Pursuant to the terms of the Merger Agreement, Micro Focus will acquire each outstanding share of common stock of NetManage for $7.20 per share, for an aggregate transaction value of approximately $73.3 million.
"The combination of Micro Focus and NetManage will provide the enlarged group with further opportunities for growth through a more comprehensive and broader product offering, enhancing our position as a leading player in the Applications Modernization market," Stephen Kelly, chief executive officer of Micro Focus, said at the time of the announcement. For more on NetManage, go here. More information on Micro Focus is available here.
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TIBCO Announces Products, Partnerships to Better Automate IT Operations
TIBCO Software announced it has added new functionality to its ActiveMatrix Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform that automatically predicts and fixes IT service problems before they slow down access to mission critical business information. In addition, TIBCO announced it is teaming with BMC Software, which will embed TIBCO ActiveMatrix into its Business Service Management (BSM) platform.
The new TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Performance Manager helps IT departments take action to solve technology problems before they occur. ActiveMatrix Service Performance Manager tracks business Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and can monitor actual latency within context and time. It predicts and solves problems by taking action to, for example, replicate an SOA service module or bring on-line additional servers to automatically head off slowdowns and service interruptions and sends a notice of the action taken. The TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Performance Management module is scheduled for release in calendar Q2 of 2008.
TIBCO also announced that it is teaming up with BMC Software, which will embed TIBCO ActiveMatrix in its Business Service Management (BSM) platform. The offering combines TIBCO's infrastructure software with BMC's IT management offerings. Spanning enterprise systems, applications, databases and service management, BSM empowers the world's largest and most sophisticated companies to automate their IT and align it with the needs of the business.
For years, IT has done a stellar job automating the operations of all other departments across the enterprise, but has done a poor job of automating or streamlining its own operations, said Bob Beauchamp, BMC's president and chief executive officer, at TIBCO's recent user conference. "IT is the 'Cobbler's Children,' " he explained. "IT still largely operates today the same way our applications and systems operated 15 years ago." Many IT operations are still siloed, Beauchamp related, citing the case of one customer that had a systems outage, resulting in "77 people on a phone call, shouting IP addresses at each other."
TIBCO also announced that it would be offering a hardware-messaging appliance specifically designed to accelerate the capabilities and performance of TIBCO Rendezvous software at high-volume financial services sites. This integrated hardware/software combination will offer improved application-to-application, ultra-low latency messaging throughput for mission critical data, TIBCO said. The vendor estimated that organizations would also be able to reduce the amount of server space required to run the Rendezvous software by a 10 to 1 ratio. For more information, visit the TIBCO Web site.
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IBM Acquires InfoDyne
IBM announced it has acquired InfoDyne Corp., a provider of high-speed platforms and data feed connectors based in Park Ridge, IL. According to IBM, InfoDyne complements its software products for the financial markets industry, such as WebSphere Front Office for Financial Markets, WebSphere MQ Low Latency, and WebSphere DataPower appliances. InfoDyne products will become part of the IBM Software Group WebSphere software brand.
InfoDyne provides software "that is designed to enable today's highly competitive trading firms and other venues to process exploding data volumes at micro-second response rates," said Tom Rosamilia, general manager of WebSphere Software for IBM’s Software Group, during a conference call announcing the deal. "This is really a big play for us in the low latency space. We see lots of firms out there - lots of trading firms - needing to process loads of information," he observed. InfoDyne's market data delivery platform and rich feed handler portfolio take data from hundreds of sources and deliver it in a standardized format, helping customers to control escalating data feed costs.
With the widespread adoption of electronic trading driving exponential growth in transaction and data volumes, IBM cited industry figures that an estimated four billion shares per day trade on the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ and regional exchanges, six times the volume on these same exchanges five years ago. In this environment, said IBM, systems and software need the ability to process millions of messages per second from multiple feeds in microseconds, and require interoperability with a firm's middle- and back-office applications.
The addition of InfoDyne's capabilities is intended to strengthen IBM's product portfolio in providing an exchange-neutral platform, with high-speed connectivity that gives firms faster access to market data, accelerates their ability to execute and complete trades, and enhances the flexibility required to comply with both current and future regulations. "Low latency environments are constantly tuned to ensure that the raw data and analytics required to supporting the trading desks are fast and reliable," said Rosamilia. "We have seen an explosion of this type of data in the past few years, so we really believe that this platform will give us some advanced capability. In fact, we think that the combination of InfoDyne and IBM WebSphere is going to result in one of the most powerful software offerings for market traders in the financial services industry."
"Our product today is a sixth-generation release," observed Guy Tagliavia, InfoDyne's president and CEO. "It is very mature technology." For more about InfoDyne, go here. For more about IBM's products for financial markets, go here.
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