Compuware extends leadership position in ensuring outstanding end-user experience with enhanced application service management solutions

Compuware Corporation has enhanced its application service management solutions with the availability of Compuware Vantage 9.8 and a portfolio of related service offerings that enable IT organisations to deliver the high-performing applications that serve the core needs of the business.

These Compuware offerings expand the ability of IT to achieve service goals by providing a highly scalable solution to monitor all users, all the time. Further advances in performance analysis integrate detailed J2EE analysis, early detection of infrastructure change and application service mapping data. Expertly delivered professional services enable more effective performance troubleshooting in production and more comprehensive service assurance in pre-production.

"Business expectations have been raised in terms of application availability and performance," says Matt Evenson, Manager of Enterprise Monitoring Solutions at Farm Bureau Financial Services. "It's imperative that we can actively monitor end-user experience and then be able to drill down to the Java code components to ensure high levels of service."

Results of a recent study commissioned by Compuware and conducted by Forrester Consulting found that 87 percent of respondents agree or strongly agree that the best way to manage the service of business-critical applications is by measuring performance at the end-user level and rapidly resolving significant performance problems.

To this end, Vantage 9.8 provides IT with the industry's most comprehensive insight into end-user experience and how the business is using network and server resources. In addition, professional services arm an IT organisation with strategic guidance and best practices for successful Application Service Management in the short or long term.

"Compuware Vantage 9.8 provides us with the most comprehensive end-user experience monitoring and end-to-end transaction performance analysis, reinforcing our customer's initiatives to adopt ITIL processes," said Mike McLachlan, Vice President, Sales and Marketing for BayTech, a Compuware 360 Partner. "Compuware Vantage is integral to BayTech's ability to improve the scalability, availability and reliability of business applications.

Agentless Monitoring and Advanced Web Transaction Diagnostics

New capabilities in Compuware Vantage 9.8 provide agentless monitoring, enabling IT to expand its reach to external Web users such as business partners and web customers. The ability to monitor application service levels without pre-installation of agents or transaction definitions on end-user workstations saves time and effort for both IT and end users.

"IT operations organisations are focusing on end-to-end response-time monitoring technologies as their first priority for availability- and performance-monitoring investments. Business processes' increasing reliance on IT will continue to drive this trend toward 24x7 application availability and continued end-to-end monitoring," said Debra Curtis, Research Vice President, Gartner. "To achieve best coverage, clients should plan to adopt more than one monitoring approach to support their many application and user types."

More Effective J2EE Troubleshooting

Compuware Vantage 9.8 integrates revolutionarily deep J2EE performance analysis with comprehensive end-user experience monitoring. IT can follow a transaction over the network and into the data center and quickly drill down to determine whether a slow JSP page is CPU- or code-intensive, running low on memory, or waiting on back-end server processing. These deep diagnostics tie into end-user transaction monitoring to automatically capture critical information for poorly performing business transactions.

Integrated Application Mapping and Change Detection

Compuware Vantage 9.8 imports application-mapping relationships discovered by Collation's Confignia into a Compuware Vantage KPI dashboard, supplementing the health reporting for key business applications and locations. When a Vantage dashboard indicates a service delivery problem, operations teams can immediately see what changed and whether application or system infrastructure changes caused the problem. If changes are indicated, users can directly drill down to Collation Confignia to understand what has changed and where.

"Compuware Vantage has a two-pronged approach to helping customers deliver excellent service to their end users: proactively identifying end-user performance problems and rapidly resolving problems that do occur," said Bob Barker, Vice President Strategic Planning, Compuware. "Compuware Vantage 9.8 now provides the most complete system available for measuring end user service, complemented by the deepest insight into the interaction of an application with its underlying infrastructure components."

Application Service Management Professional Services

Delivering on Compuware's strategy to combine people, process and products to assist customers in achieving unparalleled levels of service excellence, Compuware is also announcing an enhanced portfolio of professional services for Application Service Management. These services enable IT organisations to improve the application service-levels delivered to end-users and increase the strategic value of IT to the business:

• Application Performance Triage-Combining a wealth of experience diagnosing complex performance issues with the powerful troubleshooting capabilities of Compuware Vantage, Compuware consultants resolve immediate, critical performance issues in the most complex environments.
• Application Service Assurance-When facing an IT project that will introduce significant change to applications and/or infrastructure components, such as a new application rollout or data center consolidation, Compuware assists organisations in assuring application service levels. Compuware's proven approach includes a baseline of the current environment, predictive application profiling, comprehensive performance testing, and monitoring service levels after changes are made to assure production readiness.
• Vantage Implementation Services-Utilising best practices garnered from hundreds of deployments, Compuware accelerates customer success by combining people and process with its world-class Vantage technology.
• Vantage Guardian Services-These services focus on providing long-term value and best practices to improve a customer's overall Application Service Management practices.

"Compuware's expertise in service assurance was key to our success. They know the tools and are in the business of application performance testing and monitoring," said John Mack, Director of IS, University of North Carolina, Charlotte."

"Compuware is excited to offer this expanded set of Application Service Management solutions built from years of experience delivering high value professional services to our many customers," said John Penders, Senior Vice President, Field Technical Support, Compuware. "With our world-class products and consulting expertise, we are unrivaled in our ability to help organisations improve service levels through solutions that span the application life cycle."