Microsoft Ally Zeros in on Autonomics

Looking to match IBM in autonomic computing, Microsoft Corp. is banking on an expanded partnership with a small development company being touted as the embodiment of DSI.

"We are the poster child for DSI," said Steve Pelletier, vice president of business development at AVIcode Inc., based here.

Indeed, as part of its tight alliance with Microsoft, AVIcode has been touring with the Redmond, Wash., company doing .Net Experience Expo events.

The companies also jointly presented in June at the Microsoft TechEd conference in Orlando, Fla., and the slides that Pelletier and AVIcode CEO Mike Curreri shared regarding the companys road map looked eerily similar to those that Eric Rudder, Microsofts senior vice president of servers and tools, showed in his keynote at the VSLive conference earlier this year.

Moreover, Microsoft will be shipping the Operations Edition of Intercept Studio, AVIcodes .Net application monitoring software, with MOM (Microsoft Operations Manager) 2005. Intercept Studio Operations Edition for MOM 2005 will be distributed as the Microsoft .Net Management Pack beginning in July, the companies said.

AVIcodes application fault management software simplifies application maintenance and troubleshooting, and it detects crashes and performance degradations of production applications running on Microsofts .Net Framework.

DSI is a commitment from Microsoft and its partners to help IT teams capture and use knowledge to design more manageable systems and automate ongoing operations. AVIcode tools help enterprises bridge the gap between IT operations and development staffs.

Yitzhak Kabinsky, a software architect at Odimo Inc., a Sunshine, Fla., online retailer, said that Intercept Studio "allows us to see whats happening in our applications in a production environment, with no tampering of the code, while the application is running."