New Wares Target Network, Desktop IT Management
Spectrum Dominion culls performance metrics such as capacity and availability from a client's network management tools and delineates the financial impact when services fail because of infrastructure problems, said Darren Orzechowski, vice president of marketing at Aprisma, based here.
"IT managers can look at the investment their company has made . . . in things like network devices, applications and services [where they want to be able to track return on investment over time," Orzechowski said.
Customers are increasingly asking whether their IT resources are giving back the financial returns they should be, a question IT portfolio management can answer, said Alan Gilbert, vice president of strategic alliances at GuideComm, a solution provider in Chantilly, Va. "We're looking to give folks a better understanding of what they've got, how much it's being used and whether it's over- or underutilized."
Spectrum Dominion, priced starting at $17,000, is compatible with Aprisma's Spectrum and Hewlett-Packard's OpenView. The company plans to link to other vendors' tools in the future, Orzechowski said.
While Aprisma looks at a client's network, Houston-based Scalable Software narrows the focus to the desktop with Survey 2.0, a tool released last week that inventories software licenses and measures how much time users spend actively working with specific desktop and Web applications.
By using Survey 2.0, solution providers can help customers save money on unnecessary software licenses, said Lance Berg, director of systems management at Paragon Development Systems, Oconomowoc, Wis.
"With IT budgets [being cut, you have to do more with less, and the last thing customers want to spend IT dollars on is software that's not being utilized," he said.
In one instance, the company discovered that a client with 9,000 Microsoft Office Professional licenses had 5,000 users that could have had Standard licenses because they never used Access.
Survey 2.0 costs $15 per network user.