Managed Objects Unveils New Tools for Business Service Management

Through its business service management approach, Managed Objects aims to tie the performance of IT infrastructure to the services it supports, such as online trading or supply chain management.

The new products include Formula Business Experience Manager for monitoring end-user experience and application performance, and Formula Business Data Integrator for cross-referencing business metrics with IT data.

With Business Experience Manager, Managed Objects has integrated three functionalities typically offered through separate products: synthetic transaction testing of applications from inside or outside the firewall, end-user response time monitoring, and performance monitoring of Java applications, said Siki Giunta, president and CEO of McLean-based Managed Objects.

The company plans to add support for applications based on Microsoft .Net in subsequent versions, she said.

"It analyzes network problems and lets us correlate things that otherwise we would have to maintain or buy another tool for," said Jerry Foy, director of global operations at integration and outsourcing firm Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), El Segundo, Calif.

Managed Objects' tools provide data that help CSC show Web hosting customers that it is delivering service levels as promised, Foy said.

With the vendor's second new tool, Business Data Integrator, customers can correlate business metrics with IT performance, Giunta said.

"It lets customers create a threshold that's more business-related than technology-related," Giunta said.

For example, a network administrator might tie service levels to the number of withdrawals per hour supported by a bank's ATM machine rather than the availability rating of the network underneath it, she said.

Another option might be for a business to monitor the average daily sales totals of its online order processing, said Helen Donnelly, vice president of marketing at Managed Objects.

"If the totals are 50 percent off from the year before, then they can have IT investigate," Donnelly said. "It may be a result of poor response time on the site."

The new products give solution providers a quick way to introduce business service management to their clients, Donnelly said.

"This approach enables partners to go in and say, 'If you're only interested in managing services by end-user experience, you can get results immediately,'" she said.

Available now, Business Experience Manager and Business Data Integrator start at $50,000 each.