Amdahl’s Purchase and Partnership Broaden Scope
In an effort to expand its reach, Amdahl Global Solutions (Amdahl GS, www.amdahl.com) bought one software company and partnered with another. Amdahl GS recently bought the assets and intellectual property of Sentryl Software Corp. (
www.sentryl.com), which builds and sells Stars, a distributed storage management and application recovery software suite. Stars, which is compatible with all leading storage management and backup products, is designed to ensure automated recovery of distributed, business-critical applications. Alan Bell, group president of Amdahl GS, says the acquisition contributes to Amdahl’s data management offerings. "This [data management] area of IT infrastructure will continue to grow, especially with the explosion of e-commerce driven applications," he predicts.
On the application development and monitoring front, Amdahl inked an agreement with Rational Software Corp. (
www.rational.com), through which Amdahl’s EnView application performance monitoring system incorporates Rational’s PerformanceStudio predeployment load testing product. The goal of the agreement is to create a solution that brings performance management full cycle, from load and stress testing -- before an application goes into production -- to ongoing performance monitoring -- once it has been deployed.
"As a vendor, we need to look at business applications through the entire life cycle," says Charlie Latch, director of marketing at Amdahl. "Customers can benefit if we stop treating development and quality assurance as the end of an application’s life cycle. We’re trying to extend the performance management of applications from production on through the actual life of an application."
The EnView family of software products enables IT organizations to monitor end-to-end response and the availability of business applications without regard for the many complex technology components that impact service. Unlike traditional performance monitors and emerging agent-based technologies, EnView offers continuous measurement of end-user response times, offering a proactive approach to service level and availability management through reporting with real-time visual displays, audible alarms as well as historical and trend reporting.
PerformanceStudio integrates functional and load testing to gauge system performance and deliver information needed to make deployment and resource planning decisions. It includes Rational's product for script recording and built-in test asset management, as well as DataSmart Recording, ClientSmart Pacing, LoadSmart Scheduling and ServerSmart Playback aimed at improving ease-of-use, accuracy and scalability.
"This alliance will enable businesses to obtain performance management before and after an application goes into production," says Tom Bogan, vice president and general manager of Rational's automated testing products.
Together, these products will provide global organizations with the ability to plan, test and monitor distributed client/server and Web-based applications, such as e-commerce and SAP R/3.
"In essence what we’ve done is create a product that lets companies keep the work they’ve done on stress testing and load balancing and use it for performance monitoring," Latch says.