BMC Revs Management Tool

BMC Software Inc. this week will launch the MasterCell technology it acquired last April with the acquisition of IT Masters Inc. under a new moniker and with further integration into BMCs management tools.

The Houston companys new Service Impact Manager, which automatically links IT assets with the business services they support, detects changes in the status of those assets and communicates the impact of those changes to targeted users, according to Mark Levy, director of product management for BMC.

The updated software includes new integration with Patrol Enterprise Manager, allowing it to gather event data from BMCs Event Manager. It can also integrate with other event management systems, such as IBMs Tivoli Enterprise Console, and with BMCs Remedy trouble-ticketing system.

"The Patrol integration was enhanced to make it easier to integrate existing systems managed by Patrol," said Gary Davis, product manager for Service Impact Manager.

BMC split up the event management function in the original MasterCell tool to create a separate Event Manager, which will also be launched this week. Event Manager collects, processes and automates events from the IT infrastructure, automatically reducing redundant events. It displays results in user-customized views, based on roles and preferences, and feeds the results to Service Impact Manager to aid in prioritizing IT response to outages.

"It does let you see the relationship between a particular asset or a process ... and how events will affect other things because of those relationships," said John Siniawski, senior partner at Renovance LLP, in Chicago. "In the old days, youd get a Tivoli alert, and it tells you the IP address of the problem but gives you no visualization of how it affects things."

Service Impact Manager is available now in a new service starter pack that includes the infrastructure, console and predefined service components for $80,000. Event Managers pricing starts at $50,000.