InformationWeek

August 4, 1997

Troubleshooter For R/3 Enterprise Apps

Envive Inspector diagnoses problems

tartup Envive Corp. this week will release an SAP R/3 management product that, according to beta users, can save large sites time and money finding and fixing problems in their R/3 enterprise applications.

Envive Inspector For R/3 offers performance and availability monitoring across multiple R/3 installations. Key features include problem diagnosis, recommendations, predictive analysis, and historical reporting.

BMC Software, Computer Associates, Tivoli Systems, and smaller vendors already offer R/3 management products. But users say Envive's product drills deeper.

"This takes information from all the computers and all the application serve rs and puts it together," says Kevin Richardson, SAP technical manager at M/A Com, an electronics equipment maker in Lowell, Mass., that's testing the product. "Then it tells you what to do to fix any problems."

An IT manager at another beta site-one of the world's largest R/3 customers-says the company tried for weeks to find the cause of its slow R/3 database response time. After installing Inspector, it took just minutes to find the problem-one of the transactions was slow-and get a recommendation on how to fix it. Other management products, the user says, only identify problems.

Sue Aldrich, an analyst at the Patricia Seybold Group in Boston, says the value of Envive Inspector is the advice it provides. "The tricky thing about an SAP problem is that it often involves the behavior of the platform, the application software, and the database," Aldrich says. "Having a product that says, 'Hey, this is what the issue is and here's some possible resolutions' is a huge advantage."

Envive Inspector fo r R/3 is available now. Pricing starts at $40,000.

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