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Tuesday, December 2, 2003; 12:00 AM
WHITE PLAINS, NY AND BEDFORD, MA — December 1, 2003 - SMARTS, the leading provider of automated real-time business assurance solutions, and BladeLogic, the number one provider of data center automation software, announced a global alliance today that brings self-healing systems management capabilities to data centers and allows IT organizations to accelerate the drive toward a more efficient utility computing model. The agreement enables customers to easily leverage both SMARTS InCharge™ and BladeLogic Operations ManagerTM to automatically provision, change, monitor, diagnose, and repair application infrastructure, giving IT managers unparalleled visibility and control to improve service responsiveness and reduce operational costs.
"With the growing trend toward real-time infrastructure, companies are demanding ways to automate the time-consuming process of managing application infrastructure - from provisioning servers and applications, to proactively finding and analyzing problems, to auto-correction and compliance assurance," said Ronni Colville, Research Director at Gartner. "Having these capabilities integrated can improve mission critical application availability by shortening time-to-resolve outages or performance degradation, thus quickly and cost-effectively responding to increasing business demands."
Through the agreement, which includes product integration and sales collaboration, customers can quickly implement industry-leading capabilities for efficiently managing complex and distributed application infrastructure. SMARTS' InCharge™ common information model and intelligent event correlation engine reveals interactions between the network elements, systems, applications, services, and customers they support. InCharge proactively recognizes underlying service-affecting problems and immediately calculates their impact on the business, allowing problem resolution to be prioritized based on service impact.
In turn, BladeLogic Operations Manager automates corrective action across thousands of servers and their corresponding applications according to service level agreements or configuration policies for compliance or security. For example, data centers can easily provision new servers and application releases, install patches, or disable insecure services or ports. Together, by integrating SMARTS' fault analysis and BladeLogic's change automation capabilities, the products give customers the ability to automate the lifecycle of managing a dynamic application environment in a proactive and self-healing manner, enabling superior levels of security, responsiveness and cost effectiveness.
"SMARTS and BladeLogic share a very similar goal - to strip out the complexity and high cost of managing today's application infrastructure through intelligence-driven data center automation," said SMARTS Roger Pilc, Chief Operating Officer. "By combining the strengths of two market leaders with complementary solutions, our customers can leverage the most cutting-edge and comprehensive solution in the market today to assure high application uptime and rapid mean-time-to-repair."
"Most systems management automation has been limited to only monitoring infrastructure to identify problems leaving diagnosis and resolution to time-consuming, costly and error-prone manual processes," said Dev Ittycheria, President and CEO of BladeLogic.
"But with increasing infrastructure complexity, rising service level expectations and escalating pressure to cut costs, IT organizations now require an integrated and highly automated approach to problem detection, business impact analysis, and resolution according to business policies. The alliance between BladeLogic and SMARTS provides customers with a proven and compelling solution to address this fundamental management problem."
About BladeLogic Operations Manager
BladeLogic Operations Manager enables IT organizations to efficiently and securely provision and configure their UNIX, Linux and Windows servers and automate all ongoing changes required for application release management, patch management, and configuration repair. Furthermore, BladeLogic Operations Manager enables IT managers to proactively measure compliance to security and configuration policies and automatically correct discrepancies in order to maintain configuration consistency in the data center. By providing the ability to effect large scale provisioning and change while ensuring compliance to policies, Operations Manager allows organizations to implement "Coherency" - which enables any change, across any platform, with any skill TM - to address today's key data center management challenges while offering a tangible roadmap to a utility computing environment.
About SMARTS InCharge
The InCharge business assurance suite is the only IT management solution that can determine - automatically, and in real-time - how infrastructure problems impact services and customers. Users know exactly what they need to fix to keep business services up and running - without guesswork, manual analysis, or rules-writing. SMARTS InCharge was designed from the start to bridge the gap between IT and business. The solution's common information model and correlation engine - unique in the industry - automatically reveal the connections between technology components within and across domains, from the most basic network elements to the services and customers they support. InCharge ignores meaningless symptoms and hones in on service-affecting problems, immediately calculating their business impact.
About BladeLogic
BladeLogic is the number one provider of data center automation software with a large installed base of Fortune 500 and other leading customers including Charter Communications, General Electric, Microsoft, Priceline, Sprint, SunGard, Qwest, Wal-Mart.com, and WebEx. BladeLogic Operations ManagerTM enables any change, across any platform, with any skill - allowing companies to efficiently provision, configure, and manage today's complex application infrastructure with a proven return on investment in 3-6 months. BladeLogic is headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.bladelogic.com.
About SMARTS
SMARTS (System Management ARTS Incorporated) -- winner of the 2003 Network Computing "Well-Connected Award" for Best Network Management Suite, the "Third Annual Excellence Award" from eWeek, and named the "Best Product of 2002" by Communications Solutions Magazine -- is the leading provider of automated real-time business assurance solutions. The SMARTS InCharge™ suite is the industry's only smart software for managing networks, systems, and applications in alignment with the business they support. The solution bridges the gap between IT and the business by leveraging patented technologies: a common information model across IT and business objects and Codebook Correlation Technology™ that can automatically diagnose any service-affecting problem and its business impacts. The unprecedented intelligence built into SMARTS solutions automatically adapts to the managed environment for the industry's fastest deployment and highest ROI.
SMARTS InCharge manages the world's largest, most complex networks, with a customer base including more than 100 global corporate enterprises, educational and government institutions, and 11 of the 12 top North American and U.K. service providers. SMARTS customers include: Microsoft, Verizon, UPS, The TJX Companies, Inc., GlidePath, SunTrust Banks, Inc., Computer Sciences Corporation, Blue Cross - Blue Shield, DoubleClick, Inc., and SWIFT.
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