Excellence Awards 6 Winners, Finalists Show Innovation Up and Down IT Stack - ' IT Quality Assurance Tools ' (
Page 12 of 14 )
CATEGORY: IT QUALITY ASSURANCE TOOLS
WINNER
Compuware
Vantage 9.8
Compuwares Vantage rose above the pack of IT Quality Assurance entries with its focus on todays newly volatile IT environment: the price thats being paid for the benefits that come from service-based interaction among diversely owned IT assets.
Vantage discovers application and server relationships and correlates these with reported service delivery problems. Its dashboards lead IT operators to the infrastructure changes that most often turn out to be the unintended triggers of service disruption.
Vantage 9.8 got its final nudge to Excellence honors from the enthusiastic praise of longtime user Matt Evanson at FBL Financial Group, in West Des Moines, Iowa. "We have utilized Compuwares Vantage product suite for close to 10 years now. We use it to provide our technical infrastructure and application service monitoring. It helps our company focus on the performance and availability of our application services to our end users," said Evanson, enterprise monitoring solutions team leader, when contacted by the judges in this category for field-based perspective.
"[Compuware] focused on the end-user experience instead of just focusing on low-level technical monitoring," Evanson added. He also reinforced the frequent observation of Excellence judges that enterprise buyers are looking for a partner, not just a product. "Compuware is very conscientious about looking for product improvement from its customers," Evanson emphasized, saying that the company identifies intensive users and looks to them for input.
FINALISTS
Akimbi Systems
Akimbi Slingshot 2.0
Akimbi Systems Slingshot 2.0 offers technology that dramatically accelerates the setup and reconfiguration of testbed environments. With Junes announcement of Akimbi Slingshots Ready-for-Rational certification, the company is partnering with IBM to offer integrated, out-of-the-box capability for capturing and reproducing defects.
Netscout Systems
nGenius Performance Manager
"We wanted to move on from how much our network was being used to how it was being used," said Andrew Brill, team lead and consultant specialist in the IT function of Kaiser Permanente, when contacted for comments on nGenius Performance Manager. "There is no better tool for network reporting," Brill added.
—Henry Baltazar and Peter Coffee
Analytics & Reporting
Application Development
Business Integration Systems
Business Relationship Management
Desktop & Mobile Hardware
E-Business Foundations
E-Mail Management & Security
Enterprise Collaboration
Enterprise Storage Hardware
Enterprise Storage Software
IT Quality Assurance Tools
Productivity Applications
Server Hardware
Networking & Management Tools
Networking Infrastructure
System & Application Management
Authentication & User Management
Network Data-Stream Protection
Vulnerability Assessment & Remediation
Application Development 
/ 4 
