InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
December 8, 1997
3Com, BMC To Link Management Products
Agreement gives customers one place to receive network, system, app information
3Com Corp. and BMC Software Inc. this week will announce plans to integrate their management products with the goal of giving their customers one place to receive network, system, application, and database management information.
BMC's Patrol software, which specializes in application management, will feed into 3Com's Transcend console, which gathers information on 3Com and other net- working devices.
The integration piece between these two platforms will come from InfoVista Corp. InfoVista's system will act as the repository for Transcend and Patrol information, helping administrators set up service-level agreements, create reports, and perform capacity planning based on network, systems, database, and application management information.
Thomas Jefferson University Hospital uses Patrol and Transcend and is installing the InfoVista system to integrate information on database servers with network-management data. "This way, if someone says the network is slow, we'll be able to look at all the informati
on at once and see where the problem really is, whether it's the network or the server," says Barbara McKenzie, a member of the planning group at the Philadelphia hospital.
Analysts say this kind of integration agreement is only the first step in providing what customers really need. "This ties together the network data and the application and database sides of the world. It even lays the foundation to be able to correlate information between the two worlds," says Mark Bouchard, a Meta Group analyst. "But building intelligence to automatically act on that information has yet to be done." BMC says that type of intelligence will be included in phase three of the agreement.
Featured Microsite
