Peregrine Details Optimal IT Vision

At its Synergy05 global users conference in Las Vegas on Monday, Peregrine unveiled Optimal IT, its vision for sharpening IT management. The strategy aims to give solution providers and clients the ability to better process IT data gleaned from Peregrine business intelligence applications such as AssetCenter and ServiceCenter, said Craig Macdonald, vice president of product marketing at the San Diego-based vendor.

High-end enterprise IT organizations with 5,000 to 10,000 or more seats often find themselves saturated by "tons of IT data," according to Macdonald. "With so much data at the fingertips of administrators, the issue in IT shops is typically, 'I respond to want. I don't respond to need,' " he said.

To help drive Optimal IT, Peregrine introduced BI Portal 5.2, a new version of its business intelligence portal; DecisionCenter 1.0, a hosted data-mining engine; and ServiceCenter 6.1, an upgrade of its help-desk solution.

BI Portal 5.2 offers the first set of out-of-the-box templates for analyzing IT data, Macdonald said. Working with ServiceCenter, BI Portal 5.2 allows users to better understand IT deployment and life-cycle trends, which can improve the efficiency of IT budgeting, he said. Peregrine partners also can customize templates for customers, such as those serving vertical markets like health care and financial services, he added.

ServiceCenter 6.1 brings new tools to help customers fine-tune their IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) by offering more specific data about how IT processes are linked to business processes, according to Macdonald.

And next year, Peregrine plans to roll out DecisionCenter 1.0, which will use predictive modeling to optimize an IT environment by identifying and throttling back less-critical systems when resources are strained, he said. The data-mining engine will "fashion acceptable loss," Macdonald said. "When it comes to freeing up IT resources or balancing my network, in the past I may have been able to cut everything 5 percent across the board. But now [with DecisionCenter], I don't have to do that across the board. I can cut here, add there, etc."

Created with Elder Research, Charlottesville, Va., DecisionCenter 1.0 will be hosted by Peregrine, and customers will feed it their IT data, Macdonald said. The data-mining tool stands to reduce the amount of "overresponding" that often occurs when IT networks troubleshoot, in turn boosting network efficiency and ITIL optimization, he said. Plans call for DecisionCenter 1.0 to go into beta in first-quarter 2006 and to ship three months later.

Optimal IT is head over heels above what Peregrine's competitors are trying to accomplish, said Don Casson, CEO of Evergreen Systems, a Peregrine Preferred Partner in Sterling, Va.

"BMC, IBM, CA . . . All these guys have been doing event management, but it doesn't matter if you discover that a server is down. What matters is if the guy in Omaha can get access to the order system," Casson said. "That's what ITIL is about, and Peregrine understands this."

Still, Peregrine is taking on a big challenge with the Optimal IT vision, Casson said. "For software vendors to be very valuable, they have to look over the horizon and say, 'This is where we are going to take you.' There are core things that exist inside Peregrine that give them a shot at achieving what they want to make happen," he said.

Also on Monday, Peregrine announced a partnership with BearingPoint. The McLean, Va.-based systems integrator will assist Peregrine in providing advanced business consulting, ERP and professional services expertise to enterprise customers, Macdonald said.