mValent Announces Solution to Automate Application Configuration Management
mValent Integrity software reduces by more than 50% IT time to configure and manage enterprise application infrastructures
BURLINGTON, Mass., Nov. 7 -- mValent, a leader in automated application configuration management software, today announced mValent Integrity, a new, complete solution to automating the highly complex and error-prone tasks of configuring and maintaining the underlying IT infrastructure supporting business applications. mValent Integrity manages configuration and change for thousands of software assets, including application servers, Web servers, databases, middleware, and operating systems. Based on the company's patent- pending Dynamic Configuration Model (DCM) technology, mValent Integrity reduces IT services workload by more than 50 percent and enables IT departments to successfully address application support issues with unequaled levels of configuration knowledge, change control and release automation.
"State Street Corporation is one of the world's largest financial firms," said Joe Kennedy, vice president of technology architecture and research and development, State Street Wealth Manager Services. "We manage hundreds of applications that are distributed throughout the organization and offshore locations. The environment to run these applications is extremely diverse. Adding to the complexity is the fact that State Street is a growing and global organization with many partners. Automating application configuration management enables us to reclaim IT resources, eliminate downtime, and concentrate on value-add support services such as introducing new technologies and applications."
Organizations are under intense pressure to improve business processes to gain competitive advantage and reduce costs. Companies are striving to better integrate applications internally and externally, leverage online marketing and sales across multiple channels, and launch portals for better access to information by partners and customers. Applications are often distributed and multi-tiered, running across multiple platforms, and requiring thousands of configuration parameters to be set. Advanced application platforms, such as WebSphere and WebLogic, have enabled the development of these rich business applications.
"While the benefits of automating complex and repetitive tasks have been realized in some areas of IT, application configuration management often is still handled manually," said Joe Forgione, mValent's president and CEO. "The result of this very labor-intensive, but absolutely necessary, activity is a high risk of errors, a drain of IT resources, and insufficient information to manage the infrastructure required to support new applications. Our customers tell us that the number of new business-critical applications waiting to be deployed within enterprises is at an all-time high, leading to backlogs and diminished IT service capabilities. With mValent Integrity, we offer automated configuration management to a degree that is absolutely unmatched in the industry."
New Capabilities Drive Configuration Automation Across the Application Lifecycle
Built on mValent's product platform that has been in the market for two years and driven by the DCM, mValent Integrity brings new levels of configuration knowledge, change control and release automation to application configuration management. New capabilities include:
Deep Configuration Knowledge: Granular, application view of over 300 types of IT assets including application servers, databases, middleware, operating systems, and Web servers. This view provides thorough information on cross-platform and cross-application dependencies and dependencies across the application lifecycle. With this in-depth configuration knowledge, IT can drill down, isolate, and manage thousands of configuration parameters. New features to enable this knowledge include agent-less discovery; centralized configuration repositories; role-based and logical views; and modeling of configuration dependencies.
Powerful Change Control: Extensive tracking of changes to monitor and control potential issues before they arise. New features include extensive audit reports to support IT compliance requirements; granular comparisons from the individual configuration parameter to the whole technology stack to quickly isolate configuration differences; versioning and rollbacks to restore a system to a desired state; change tracking to specific properties; point-in-time views; alerts and notifications of configuration changes; and user views by role, permission, task and geography.
Automated Release Management: Complete release management capabilities that automate desired configuration changes whether for development, QA, or production. By building and cloning application environments, standard configurations can be provisioned to target servers. New features include change modeling before the changes are implemented; template creation and cloning of configuration settings; validation that changes have been applied correctly; configuration change scheduling; and automatic deployment of changes.
"mValent offers a distinctive combination of application-service discovery, configuration audits, and active release management," said Dennis Drogseth, vice president at Enterprise Management Associates. "The introduction of new features with mValent Integrity helps to round out functionality that will provide strong contextual insights across the application infrastructure in support [of] a variety of disciplines."
mValent Integrity was designed to run cross-platform and is available on Microsoft Windows, and the leading Unix and Linux platforms. Available immediately, mValent Integrity pricing starts at $60,000 and is dependent on the number of customer CPUs under management.
About mValent
mValent's software automates application configuration management and is used to manage the building and maintenance of complex application configurations throughout their entire lifecycle from development to production. For more information, visit mValent at http://www.mvalent.com.
mValent and the mValent logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of mValent, Inc. in the United States. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.