Compuware Tackles Business Service Management
Vantage Service Manager addresses four key management challenges, from enabling a common language for business and IT to providing real-time measurement
Compuware Corporation’s new Vantage Service Manager (VSM) enables organizations to optimize IT service delivery while meeting business needs. It’s based on the company’s acquisition of Proxima Technology’s Centauri Business Service Manager and has been integrated into Compuware’s Vantage product line.
It’s tough for IT and their line-of-business counterparts to align IT service delivery with business objectives. Vantage Service Manager helps by associating business services with an organization’s application infrastructure. Compuware Vantage incorporates business service management, monitors the end-user experience, and matches application analytics with infrastructure and service desk metrics so customers get a real-time view of service delivery.
“Business service management is difficult in part because IT and business speak different languages,” Steve Tack, director of product management, told Enterprise Systems. “We solve that by mapping IT infrastructure and applications to business services; we translated technology into terms business users can relate to -- terms such as ‘server uptime’ don’t hold meaning to business users. Dashboards with real-time views into the service impact, along with a historical view of performance, help solve that problem.”
Furthermore, Tack says, because the product helps an organization establish and measure service level agreements, VSM can clarify expectations and make sure all parties understand the required performance levels.
Tack notes that IT has its own set of tools and management consoles but lacks a cohesive view. VSM offers out-of-the-box integration with key products from BMC, IBM, HP, and others. “We can move IT from siloed views to an end-to-end consolidated view, which also gets IT out of reactive mode. IT can see relationships and dependencies; when a database goes down, IT will understand what will be affected and VSM can help workers get to the root cause.”
According to Jon Greaves, distinguished engineer and chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems’ Global Customer Services, “Compuware Vantage Service Manager lets us know the level of service that is being provided to customers, in real-time, and allows us to measure customer satisfaction levels. Having real-time information on the quality of service enables us to be more flexible and to better respond to our business customers’ ever-changing needs.”
Vantage Service Manager includes predefined dashboards for IT and line-of-business users; the dashboards display real-time and historical information about business-critical services.
“IT organizations are looking for a solution that provides an integrated, comprehensive perspective on service delivery,” said John Williams, senior vice president of product management and strategy at Compuware Corporation. “Vantage Service Manager enables IT to effectively engage with line-of-business counterparts in order to communicate service delivery in business terms and to optimize service delivery based on business priorities and business impact.”
More information about Compuware is available at http://www.compuware.com/