Collation Adds to Mapping

Increased interest in running IT as a business service has the application discovery and dependency mapping arena heating up.

Collation Inc. last week bolstered its position in the growing infrastructure mapping niche with Confignia 3.0. The release comes fast on the heels of rival nLayer Communications Inc.s rollout of its Software Development Kit and OEM initiative.

Version 3.0 of the agent-free application discovery and dependency mapping software emphasizes scalability, the ability to gather component data from existing sources, greater automation and broader application environment discovery, said officials of Collation, in Palo Alto, Calif.

The company, which has partnered with Micromuse Inc. and Compuware Corp. to resell its software, sought to scale the discovery capabilities in Confignia 3.0 with a new Confignia Domain Manager that allows users to consolidate and analyze data across several deployments in separate business units or locations.

Using the Confignia Domain Manager, users at The World Bank Group were able to discover up to 14,000 components, including servers and software running on those servers.

More important to users at Nielsen Media Research Inc. is greater visibility into application dependencies for programs built on Microsoft Corp.s Windows and .Net application platforms, according to Kim Ross, CIO at Nielsen, a subsidiary of VNU Inc., in Tampa, Fla.

"The product line came out strong in the J2EE [Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition]/Java space and handled Java and Unix real well, but it didnt tackle Windows early on. These days with .Net, and in companies where Windows is the primary platform, it is more important to add more detail about Windows servers into the database," Ross said.

Ross, an early user of the Collation software, said its ability "to collect and manage a dynamic database of system assets in an organization and keep itself updated provides a foundation for service management in a complex application world."

To make the tool more appealing to larger enterprises, Collation also added a Universal Data Sensor, which can gather data from existing management tools such as Cisco Systems Inc.s CiscoWorks.

Confignia 3.0, available now, also eliminates the need to manually define business application membership.

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