Aprisma Management Technologies Inc. early next month will try to shake up the service-level management arena with enhanced versions of its Spectrum suite of management applications.
The Durham, N.H., spinoff from the former Cabletron Systems set its sights on both Hewlett-Packard Co.s OpenView and Micromuse Inc.s NetCool offerings in creating the new Spectrum Integrity for enterprises and Spectrum Infinity for service providers.
Aprisma, still on track to go public in the next few months, enhanced the core technology for both versions to improve performance—especially for large-scale operations, according to Darren Orzechowski, vice president of marketing for Aprisma in Durham. “Existing customers will see performance improvements of up to 100 percent,” he said.
At the heart of both versions is a new rules-based correlation engine that supplements Spectrums existing model-based correlation. The option allows network engineers to better perform predictive analysis.
Aprisma also added a new alarm impact analysis feature that allows alarms to be linked to a specific service or customer. “The service provider wants to be notified that an alarm is tied to a device that impacts a premium customer,” said Orzechowski.
In targeting the enterprise, Aprisma sponsored an International Data Corp. study looking at the return on investment for Spectrum. The study, conducted for Aprismas customer advisory council and looking at 20 of its largest users, found that for every $1 invested in Spectrum, customers saw a $4 return annually.
The new Spectrum Integrity for enterprises will be available in January starting at $75,000. Aprisma changed its a la carte pricing so that the base price includes all fault-management modules, discovery engine, root cause analysis and support for 850 different devices.
Spectrum Infinity for service providers, also due in January, differs from Integrity in that it can be integrated with other OSS (operation support system) applications for billing, directory services and provisioning. Specifically, it can integrate with OSS applications from Cplane and Orchestream.
Infinity also includes several gateways, including one that can accept events and traps from non-SNMP sources outside of Spectrum, along with a TL1 gateway.