Compuware application performance management solution helps IT align with business priorities

Compuware Vantage 9 enables IT to deliver service excellence with unique combination of management views and rich analytics

Hong Kong - 10 December 2003 - Compuware Asia Pacific has today unveiled its next generation application service management solution. Compuware Vantage 9 enables IT organisations to deliver service excellence by systematically and proactively improving application performance, driven by business priorities.

By monitoring application service from the end-user perspective rather than just monitoring infrastructure components, IT organisations can identify and resolve problems before they impact the business. Vantage 9 goes further by uniting management level views with end-to-end performance analysis capabilities.

"To communicate with business managers, IS organisations need business-relevant data regarding the availability, performance, user experience and service levels being delivered by the IT infrastructure", said Dion Wiggins, research director at Gartner Asia Pacific. "This requires an investment in end-to-end response time measurement and service level reporting tools."

The new capabilities of Vantage 9 enable IT teams to view the scope of application service problems in terms of affected applications, locations, transactions, and users - as well as the duration and frequency of problems - so that they can be prioritised according to their potential impact on the business. New summary views highlight performance by application and location, while detailed heat charts enable IT to identify service violations and application outages by time of day, day of week, and transactions affected.

"We rely heavily on third party service providers to fulfill our mission of supporting our business users with leading edge technology. By providing us with the end user service perspective, Vantage has helped us challenge our service providers to shift from an infrastructure management focus to a true service orientation, aligning more closely with the needs of our business," said Kjetil Dammen, Director of Application and Infrastructure Management for the City of Oslo. "We will expect our service providers to adopt the new service management capabilities of Vantage 9 to increase their operational effectiveness."

Once IT has identified the scope and impact of a service problem, Vantage 9 provides sophisticated analysis capabilities that enable an intelligent handover to the relevant technical specialists. These experts can maintain the business context as they access comprehensive application and infrastructure metrics to determine the underlying cause.

"In deploying a new collaboration application to our 30,000 users, we identified a need not only to measure end user performance and availability, but also to systematically resolve performance problems," said Frank Van De Heijning, computer scientist - director, Federal Government Service Finances (Belgium). "We chose Vantage because of its ability to drill down in context from a high level service view to detailed application performance metrics, providing the critical insight needed to deliver excellent service."

The new analysis capabilities in Vantage 9 include:

Client-Network-Server time breakdown with baseline - when a service level degradation occurs, Vantage 9 enables managers to quickly see where a poorly performing transaction has spent most of the processing time. In addition they can quickly compare these results to a baseline transaction to determine exactly where the transaction is lagging and understand what has changed to cause a problem to occur.
Comparison views - Vantage 9's English language interpretation of performance bottlenecks enables IT staff to characterise a problem with greater accuracy.
Exception-Based Analysis - Vantage 9 provides patent-pending technology to dynamically measure network behaviour throughout the course of a transaction. This makes it possible to capture a precise "transaction snapshot" at the time of a service level violation so that analysts can more easily solve problems by pinning down the actual cause.

"By bringing to light application service problems that often go undetected when only infrastructure components are monitored, breakthrough improvements in application service can be achieved," said Ross Wilkinson, regional director for North Asia at Compuware Asia Pacific. "Vantage 9 not only identifies service problems but also provides deep insight into the interaction of the application with the underlying infrastructure components, allowing swift and definitive problem resolution."

Availability

Vantage 9 is available immediately.

About Compuware

Compuware Corporation, a leading provider of software and technology services, delivers industrial-strength solutions for the enterprise computing environment that dramatically improve productivity, quality and performance across the application life cycle. For more information about Compuware, please visit http://www.compuware.com.

For sales or marketing information:
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100 Cyberport Road
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Ph: +852 25740619
Email: information.hk@compuware.com

For more information, please contact:
Francessca Ye (Compuware): (852)
francessca.ye@compuware.com

Ruth Brown/Katie Lee (EBA): (852) 2537 8022
ruth@eba.com.hk/katie@eba.com.hk