Indicative Software continues its uphill battle with the Big 4 enterprise IT management players.Indicative Software on Nov. 13 continued playing David to the Goliaths of the enterprise IT management arena when it launched the latest release of its performance monitoring and management software.
As it continues to win against the big four enterprise management players—IBM, BMC Software, Hewlett-Packard and CA—the Fort Collins, Colo., company added a little something for everyone in its Indicative 8.2 release. New features are aimed at IT operations, CIOs and LOB (Line of Business) managers, as well as PeopleSoft administrators.
At the same time Indicative extended its management of VMware virtual environments and bridged the gap between event handling and business service management.
The ability in Indicative 8.2 to dynamically model VMware services is based on automated discovery of real and virtual resources. In addition, its integration with VMwares Virtual Center management tools enables users to automatically keep track of what virtual servers are active and see when virtual machines have been reassigned.
That capability is key for new users at Brown-Forman in Louisville, Ky.
"Our main goal is to do actual application performance monitoring, but the great thing about this tool is you get a lot of other things with it. You can actually manage your entire network with it because it touches each device in the environment," said Tammy Board, director of technology infrastructure at Brown-Forman.
Although Brown-Forman had evaluated HPs Mercury tools and had experience with CAs Unicenter products, it chose Indicative because "it does everything in a more cost-effective manner," she added.
Read more here about Indicative.
For CIOs and LOB managers, Indicative added a new executive dashboard that can be easily customized for each user. The dashboard can give a high-level view of the status and health of business services and how well IT is supporting those.
The dashboard is "agnostic" to the data sources that it uses to provide those views and can include the performance of different departments such as the help desk, business units and so on, according to Angela Tucci, vice president of marketing at Indicative.
Indicative also enhanced the Real User Monitoring function added earlier this year to support Web services troubleshooting. The enhancement allows users to drill down to the method level and troubleshoot problems in the context of a problems effect on applications and business services.
The new release can also now automatically discover PeopleSoft applications and the IT infrastructure elements they are dependent on.
New event handling features enable Indicative to act as a manager of managers by incorporating events from third-party event management systems.
Despite the scalability and robustness of the management software, which has allowed Indicative to make small inroads into large enterprises, industry analysts see the tool as better suited for the midmarket, according to Lisa Erickson-Harris, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates.
"They have a pretty holistic solution, which in my view is perfect for the midmarket. As an organization they are solid, but they are fighting an uphill battle with larger companies. As an enterprise [management] platform its going to be a tough battle," she added.
Indicative 8.2 is due on Dec. 11.
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