BMC Software Inc. at Lotus Development Corp.s user conference this week will try to catch the attention of Domino application service providers with a new release of its Patrol monitoring and management software.
The update for Domino includes the ability to more closely watch the application for potential SLA (service-level agreement) violations, allowing operators to head off such problems before they occur.
The launch will be one of several announcements at the Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Fla. Other companies making news include Authentica Inc. and Interliant Inc.
By providing a better view of end-to-end response time, rather than the performance of individual servers, BMCs new active monitoring feature will help ASPs (application service providers) better focus their SLAs, said Richard Ptak, an analyst at Hurwitz Group Inc., in Framingham, Mass. “The shift will be to move away from SLAs based on transactions per second, availability of the servers or memory consumption to Is your customer being well-served?” Ptak said.
The release broadens Patrol for Dominos platform support to include management of Linux-based servers and remote management of Domino on IBM AS/400 and S/390 hosts.
“The fact that BMC addresses multiple platforms is one of its strengths as a vendor,” said Tim Grieser, an analyst at International Data Corp., in Framingham, Mass. It also allows Houston-based BMC to compete more effectively against mainframe software rival Candle Corp. and its Intelliwatch tools.
Version 4.4, available later this month in a free upgrade for current users, also adds the ability to track top senders and receivers as well as to monitor replication. It costs $525 per server for Intel-based servers.
Authentica, of Waltham, Mass., will introduce at Lotusphere its MailRecall product for Lotus Notes. The protection software, which already has versions for e-mail applications Microsoft Corp.s Outlook and Qualcomm Inc.s Eudora, is available now, with pricing starting at $20,000 for 25 licensed users.
Interliant, an ASP in Purchase, N.Y., will announce the immediate availability of INIT Managed Messaging for Domino, which can be hosted at the users site or at one of Interliants data processing centers. Interliant also will team with Sun Microsystems Inc. to offer its hosted Web-based INIT Team product for Lotus QuickPlace 2.0, a collaboration tool, on the Solaris platform. The INIT Team portal initially was launched on the Windows NT operating system. It is available now.