BMC Tools Track Performance
Under the Enterprise Assurance Initiative, BMC plans to offer tools that help customers monitor, measure, report and predict the performance of their network infrastructures, said David Wagner, director of product marketing at BMC, based here. "To manage performance optimally, you have to know what you've been doing, what you are doing, and what you're going to do," he said.
The centerpiece of the initiative is BMC's predictive modeling technology, which tells customers what impact changes in users or equipment will likely have on network performance, he said.
Patrol Perceive, the first product offered under the initiative, is an entry-level monitoring tool that solution providers can deploy to help customers decide where to add higher-level performance assurance solutions, such as BMC's Patrol Perform and Patrol Predict tools, Wagner said. "Solution providers can use [Patrol Perceive as a tripwire into full-blown solutions when and where their customers need it," he said.
Patrol Perceive publishes performance data gathered from remote software agents and historical performance databases through a Web browser, making the information available to a wide range of users within an organization, Wagner said. The product comes with several preconfigured data views, but solution providers can also customize the views, he said.
Solution providers have been building tools to provide Web-based reporting, and this gives them a prepackaged option, Wagner added.
"[Patrol Perceive will provide us a pretty good [sales opportunity because some of our clients didn't want a home-grown solution for management of their enterprise reporting," said Jim Griffiths, systems engineer at network integrator Maryville Technologies, St. Louis.
Patrol Perceive is available now starting at $20 per desktop and $100 per server.
Also under the initiative, BMC plans to introduce later this month Patrol for iSeries--Predict, a modeling tool for IBM AS/400 systems starting at $350, and an upgrade to Mainview Performance Assurance for IBM OS/390 mainframes, starting at $3,900.