BMC Expands Performance Line

BMC Software Inc. has added a pair of new performance management tools to its Enterprise Performance Assurance lineup that extend the Web-based management capabilities into mainframes and AS/400s.

The Mainview Perceive and Patrol for iSeries-Perceive provide Web-based access to historical performance data on mainframes and their applications as well as AS/ 400s and their applications.

"Now we have a common way on the Web to look at performance across all server environments," said Dave Wagner, BMC's director of product management, in Waltham, Mass. "It is common technology, common look and feel, and common use [across Microsoft Corp.'s Windows, Unix, Linux, mainframe and iSeries servers]."

The existing Patrol Perceive performance data access tool was also upgraded to support new applications, including Oracle Corp.'s e-Business Suite, Siebel Systems Inc.'s e-business applications, IBM's WebSphere and SAP AG's R/3, allowing users to understand the application resource usage of those environments.

The Performance Assurance capacity planning tools allow users to gather and analyze historic and current-use data and create business-oriented base lines. They can be used to evaluate the impact of business change on IT or the impact of IT change on business, Wagner said. "You can predict what will happen if an organization makes a change in IT—such as response time for end users will get better or worse—and by how much," he said.

The simple, Web-based view of performance data can be used by line-of-business managers to get a self-service view of performance, officials said.

The Perceive Web server tools can run on any platform, and they can automatically discover any other BMC offerings already in use within a production environment. The tools can also gather data from other BMC agents or data stores and connect to asset databases to view how assets are being used.

"We've had customers find 10 to 50 servers that were doing nothing. Once they find those, users can drive incremental cost out of the enterprise," said Wagner.

Mainview Perceive and Patrol for iSeries-Perceive are due next month from BMC, of Houston. The software starts at $20 per server for the Windows version and $110 for the mainframe version.