Tools bridge IT, operations

Computerworld - Vendors are offering tools they say will help bridge the gap between development and IT operations and ease angst about management of distributed applications.

Mercury Interactive Corp. next week is set to unveil a diagnostic tool that company executives said will allow IT departments to identify, diagnose and resolve problems across J2EE, .Net, ERP and CRM applications.

The Diagnostics 3.0 tool will provide application testers and IT operations with one tool to manage performance as enterprises move applications to distributed platforms, said Ramin Sayar, director of product marketing at Mountain View, Calif.-based Mercury.

"Overall, what bridges these two groups ... is the need to manage end-to-end service performance ... and to be able to proactively detect and resolve problems," he said.

SmartMoney.com uses the Mercury Managed Services hosted system for monitoring the performance of its external Web sites and for the application service provider-based portfolio management and investment tools it provides to clients. The diagnostic tools, which will include Mercury's new offering, allow SmartMoney to troubleshoot application issues before they become problems to end users, said Al Castrillon, manager of technical operations at the New York-based firm. "You don't want to restrict your development team to a specific platform because of your monitoring technology," he said.

Dana Gardner, an analyst at The Yankee Group in Boston, said that before the unified Mercury tool, enterprises were forced to choose among tools for monitoring application performance based on platform and type of application.

To help organizations manage code and content changes in distributed environments, Interwoven Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., this week will roll out its Interwoven Content Provisioning suite. The suite is designed to let enterprises standardize how code and content changes are aggregated, synchronized and deployed in complex Web application environments.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts Inc. is rolling out all the products in Interwoven's new suite to anchor the organization's enterprise strategy to move code and content across applications, said Frank Enfanto, vice president of operations delivery and information security at Blue Cross. "It allows you to move content along through different environments from development to staging to production in an organized and proper workflow," he said.

Compuware Corp. late last month announced new versions of its application performance management technology. Executives said it will help companies manage the performance of distributed applications that access IBM's DB2 on mainframes.

Compuware Strobe 3.2 pinpoints which SQL statements are using the most available CPU space or have delayed response turned on, allowing users to identify where problems are occurring. And iStrobe 2.1 lets users measure the performance of applications, the Detroit-based company said.