BMC Introduces New Products For Channel

The solutions span a number of product lines, including MainView, Energizer and InTune. According to Jonathan Adams, director of research and development for the MainView line, they were expected to be available to channel partners immediately.

"We're trying to give [channel partners] the opportunity to monitor, manage, automate and optimize performance of computing environments quickly and painlessly," Adams said. "As network operations continue to grow, the need for applications to monitor and ensure performance of those operations becomes increasingly critical."

As such, BMC's new offerings seek to optimize uptime in every environment, providing broad support for IBM's zSeries mainframe platform.

In network operations, the Houston-based firm released updates to its MainView family - MainView for IP 2.2 and MainView for CICS 5.7. The first, MainView for IP 2.2, debuts a new technology dubbed "IP Pacing" that helps ensure mission-critical Internet applications receive priority access to bandwidth. As Adams explained, the technology aims to help customers determine how they can utilize their infrastructures more efficiently to prioritize their workloads.

The second, MainView for CICS 5.7, is designed to improve performance at those companies where network administrators are trying to Web-enable legacy applications. Adams noted that this solution also facilitates the process of upgrading older CICS applications, a long-standing complaint of customers in the financial services and banking industries.

"For years, nobody in the industry knew how to handle upgrades in this area," he said of CICS. "With this product, BMC now is the only vendor who can tackle it."

Another new network operations product, Energizer for CICS 4.4, is designed to improve system availability by eliminating bottlenecks and lockouts, thereby increasing network throughput and optimizing uptime. Adams said when the Energizer product is combined with MainView for CICS 5.7, customers can use both solutions from a single point of display.

Lastly, in application management, BMC launched broader application support for its InTune mainframe tuning solution, becoming the first systems management vendor to manage application quality for batch SAP applications on the mainframe.

With InTune 3.2, BMC also now supports application tuning in the WebSphere MQ environment, an effort that enables users to automate up to 90 percent of the effort required to tune mainframe applications. This new version of InTune is the latest step in BMC's Application Quality Management (AQM) solution.

Pricing for MainView for IP starts at $24,000; MainView for CICS 5.7 starts at $33,000; and Energizer for CICS 4.4 starts at $26,500.

InTune 3.2 is priced from $54,000. The InTune Application Quality Management package, which includes APC for InTune, starts at $75,600.