Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Business Availability Center Products Overview

Business Availability Center products are an extensive package of advanced, state-of-the-art tools for measuring and managing critical business processes to ensure business efficiency, stability and longevity in the market. Designed by Mercury Interactive, Business Availability Center products offer users an innovative approach to integrating business, end-user and system perspectives, while also providing a detailed analysis of the infrastructure that incorporates critical applications.

With the help of Mercury Interactive Business Availability Center products, organizations can: manage IT from a business perspective to improve service levels; translate business objectives into IT operational level agreements; ensure alignment between LOBs and IT by measuring and reporting on service levels from an end-user perspective; obtain a detailed map applications and infrastructure environments; rapidly identify, classify and diagnose problems to prevent application downtime; assess impact before deployment in order to minimize business risk.

Mercury Interactive Business Availability Center products encompass a wide variety of innovative tools, including End User Management, Diagnostics, System Availability Management, Service Level Management, Universal CMDB, Application Mapping and SiteScope.

End User Management is used for monitoring website and application availability in real time, from the end-user perspective, allowing organizations to timely identify and fix issues. This very popular Mercury Interactive solution proactively emulates end-user business processes against applications on a 24x7 time basis for over 60 protocols, including web and non-web environments, as well as packaged applications such as Oracle, Siebel, SAP, Citrix and many more. With the help of End User Management, organizations can optimize business outcomes by improving end-users’ quality of experience; lower costs by reducing the number of help desk calls from end users due to application performance degradation; minimize revenue risk associated with customer abandonment as a consequence of unacceptable reliability or performance problems; mitigate business risks and costs by reducing the number and duration of application outages.

Mercury Diagnostics is a very popular solution that helps users to ensure availability and performance in order to provide better quality of service to the business. Mercury Diagnostics can be used to efficiently resolve a series of problems that can deteriorate business availability: end users experiencing slow performance when submitting orders; business-critical applications run out of memory; online portal for order status fails intermittently; frequent failure of cluster nodes. By using Diagnostics, organizations can substantially reduce the frequency and duration of incidences, thus lowering the costs associated with problem identification and resolution; lower costs by reducing fault management efforts, as well as hardware and software expenses; collaborate across team boundaries and streamline the learning curve of those people responsible for maintaining J2EE, NET and ERP/CRM applications.

System Availability Management, corroborated with Mercury SiteScope, enables users to efficiently deploy and maintain an enterprise infrastructure monitoring solution. System Availability Management connects to existing Enterprise Management System products or uses Mercury SiteScope to collect and monitor system availability and performance data from across the entire enterprise. With System Availability Management, organizations can maximize ROI and improve scalability by eliminating excess infrastructure capacity from the system; reduce hardware, software and support overhead associated with managing business-critical applications and infrastructure; reduce costs from topology based correlation by measuring and managing only the important aspects; increase administrator productivity via prioritized alerts based on service level or operational level breaches, instead of flood of alerts.

Mercury SiteScope is today’s most efficient agentless system monitoring solution designed to ensure the availability and performance of distributed IT infrastructures, such as servers, operating systems, network devices, network services, applications and application components. With the help of Mercury SiteScope, organizations can lower total cost of ownership by consolidating support and maintenance tasks to a central agentless server; reduce the need to track and remotely administer thousands of agents including their overhead on production systems; save time and money by deploying Solution Templates – best practice-based groups of monitors for key applications; eliminate the need for multiple solutions via SiteScope’s industry leading breadth of more than 65 supported monitoring targets.

Mercury Service Level Management enables users to proactively manage service levels from the business perspective and provide service level agreement-compliance reporting for complex business applications in distributed environments. With Mercury Service Level Management, organizations can reduce costs by eliminating the need for manual, ongoing report generation; maximize the availability of revenue producing applications; reduce the level of effort required to produce and distribute service level documentation.

Mercury Universal CMDB provides the background required to succeed in service management initiatives. The solution comprises a complete business-service-oriented data model with built-in auto-discovery of configurations and configuration item dependencies, visualization and mapping of business services, as well as tracking of configuration changes. With the help of Mercury Universal CMDB, organizations can federate and reconcile data from existing repositories and other CMDBs; visualize and map the used infrastructure in a multitude of ways; track changes using a continuous CI (configuration item) change history; perform sophisticated analyses based on complex relationships; rapidly perform tasks such as report creation, database administration, or event simulation.

Application Mapping provides visibility into the dynamic relationships between used applications and the underlying infrastructure. The solution continuously updates and maintains this topology map within a common relationship model, enabling users to quickly assess business impact of IT issues. It also substantially simplifies the complexity of understanding and controlling IT elements like networks, systems, and application interdependencies. With Mercury Application Mapping, organizations can lower deployment and maintenance costs while accelerating time-to-market; mitigate the business risk and cost of downtime; reduce data collection and assessment costs for data center consolidation initiatives; optimize Sarbanes-Oxley compliance efforts; build topology maps, evaluate business impacts, track and verify changes and prepare reports; reduce downtime and improve productivity with application diagnostics and root cause analysis for permanent resolution of issues.

These remarkable Mercury Interactive solutions are nowadays extensively used by organizations of many different types and sizes. Along with Mercury QuickTest Pro and Mercury LoadRunner (which provides high-quality load and stress testing services), Business Availability Center products can substantially increase business efficiency and performance.