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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, end-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 each unit of work takes in the appropriate order and correlate transaction data across different subsystems will replace what right now is a manual process prone to error, according to Mainview user Joseph Allen, principal IT analyst in planning and engineering at Southern Company Services in Atlanta.
“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.”
Additional functionality is planned for later this year to add real transaction monitoring across distributed systems and mainframes, service level management, a unified transaction view, transaction topology across domains and real time transaction problem resolution, according to sources.
The first two products in the initiative, due in the first quarter of 2006, include BMC Transaction Management Application Response Time and Mainview Transaction Analyzer. The Application Response Time offering executes synthetic transactions that simulate end-user behavior to provide a performance baseline.
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 CICS, IMS and DB2. Additional support is planned for 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, which provides a comprehensive set of offerings already that measure both synthetic and real transaction response times, according to Dennis Drogseth, industry analyst at Enterprise Management Associates in Portsmouth, NH.
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 Inc. in San Jose, Calif.
“What theyre trying to do sounds good as long as they have the tie-in to the CMDB to find where a transaction exploded. Its good in concept,” he said.