NetIQ Preps AppManager 6.0 Suite Upgrade For Services Management Era

The San Jose, Calif. company, a longtime Microsoft partner, announced on Monday plans to ship a slew of upgrades for its platform during the first half of 2004, including AppManager 6.0 and Diagnostic Console 2.0, and by the end of the year, plans to launch Analysis Center 2.0 and a new component called Control Center 1.0.

NetIQ, which licensed its technology to Microsoft for the Microsoft's Operations Manager platform, has added Unix and Linux support in addition to its traditional Windows management system over the past 18 months, executives said.

The launch of the enhanced suite this year is aimed at enabling management of the services oriented architecture, executives said.

With the planned AppManager 6.0 upgrade due in June, for example, NetIQ plans to add higher value-add capabilities with extended service management capabilities, a redesigned single management console and new support for Red Hat Advanced and Red Hat Enterprise servers 3.0, executives said.

The upgraded Diagnostic Console 2.0, due by June like AppManager, allows administrators to remotely detect and resolve performance issues. The upgraded version will offer new support for managing Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory, NetIQ said.

Two other significant components -- Analysis Center and Control Center -- will enter beta testing during the first half and ship later this year, executives said.

NetIQ executives called the new suite a major step forward. It will offer advanced service level reporting, service views of the entire IT infrastructure, enhanced scalability and security, better cross-platform support and better troubleshooting for Windows, Exchange and Active Directory, the company said.

As Microsoft shifts the marketing mantra for its server management products into enterprise management services at the Microsoft Management Summit 2004 next week, ISV management partners including NetIQ and others are shifting their messages to focus on for the services-oriented architecture, analysts said.

"Systems management is morphing into service management," said David Pann, vice president of product management at NetIQ, in a meeting with CRN. "We're an enabler of the realtime adaptive environment."

The Analysis Center 2.0, an upgrade from the 1.5 version shipped last October, will offer more advanced reporting capabilities that measure service levels and monitor compliance for service-level agreements.

The upgrade, due later this year, will also offer use of OLAP for enhanced performance, role-based security, the ability to offload reporting jobs from the AppManager repository and ability to generate events from within AppManager itself, the company said.

The new Control Center 1.0 module allows administrators to manage tens of thousands of computers across multiple-data repositories, NetIQ said. The center's service-map viewer gives IT operations a graphical representation of their entire scaled-out IT infrastructure, as well as data on applications.

"It gives a service view of all IT components, broken down by web service or distributed application," Pann said.

NetIQ is attempting to move from its traditional Windows enclave to the enterprise, and has lined up AppManager beta testers such as Mary Kay and Towers Perrin. NetIQ has sold 360,000 licenses for its Windows agents and between 15,000 to 20,000 licenses for its Solaris and Red Hat agents thus far, executives note.

While vendors such as HP, IBM and Sun have the majority of share in the complex enterprise systems management market, NetIQ has a differentiated offering for the scaled-out Intel infrastructure that is cross platform and easy-to-use, one analyst said.

"NetIQ is looking to move upstream to the enterprise. They had good focus in the SME (small- to-medium enterprise) segment because of the low total cost of ownership and ease of deployment of their solution, but they want to leverage it into more complex, mixed environments," said Scott Crawford, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates, Boulder, Colo., "They can compete well if they keep the simplicity of rollout and low TCO."

NetIQ said solution providers can add value by using the product's Knowledge Script capabilities to do customizations for job scheduling and automated patch management.

Existing resellers said the availability of a cross platform, full-enterprise management solution, that allows high-end and low-end administrators to monitor applications and services, is in demand.

"It's a major release," said Drew Koellmer, manager of business development at Rutter Networking Technologies, Woburn, Mass., an experienced AppManager reseller. "It helps build full-system management from definitions to operations, and you can find a component to monitor like Exchange or Citrix or Active Directory and it turns that into an operation that can be [used] by top-level guys and lower-administrator levels. It ties it all under one umbrella in a scalable way. Version 6.0 closes the loop on all-information management."