BMC Software on Feb. 13 will introduce a new end-to-end transaction management initiative intended to make managing transactions across a company easier.
The new offerings in the initiative, which will be rolled out over the next year, will combine transaction data, the user experience and infrastructure monitoring to improve business service delivery by reducing the time it takes to resolve transaction problems, according to sources close to the Houston-based company.
The ability of one of the new products, Mainview Transaction Analyzer, to trace the path that each unit of work takes in the appropriate order and correlate transaction data across different subsystems will replace a manual, error-prone process, according to Mainview user Joseph Allen, principal IT analyst in planning and engineering at Atlanta-based Southern Company Services.
“When you go to resolve a problem today, thats what you have to do by hand. With this, youd have a clearer path and it would be less error-prone,” said Allen.
The first two products in the initiative, Transaction Management Application Response Time and Mainview Transaction Analyzer, are available now. Transaction Management Application Response Time executes synthetic transactions that simulate user behavior to provide a performance base line. It also gathers session details to diagnose the root cause of failed transactions. Mainview Transaction Analyzer traces real transactions through the mainframe and will initially support IBMs CICS, IMS and DB2. Additional support is planned for IBM WebSphere MQ and WebSphere Application Server, sources said.
In its quest to deliver more cohesive transaction management, BMC will be competing with several entrenched players, including Compuware. But BMC users working with the companys Configuration Management Database, which the transaction management offerings leverage, said the transaction management offering “sounds good in theory,” according to Robert Molenda, senior application architect at Infineon Technologies, in San Jose, Calif.