InformationWeek

Clairvoyant Software Inc.
The focus: Clairvoyant provides software that helps Internet service providers, E-commerce sites, and E-businesses divine their future network bandwidth resources. The company's applications forecast the capacity of Internet infrastructures and such resources as dial-in ports, Web hosting servers, and wide area bandwidth.

Why it matters: With Clairvoyant ForeCast Resource Manager, E-business providers have the luxury of advanced notice of when they'll need to buy network resources, and where in their infrastructure they'll need to deploy them, says Bob Cicciarella, director of marketing and strategic development for research firm Enterprise Management Associates.

Managed Objects
The focus: Managed Objects wants to give users a better view. With its flagship product, Formula, administrators see a seamless, real-time representation of the entire managed environment on a single, consistent user interface.

Formula, a universal object integration engine, was developed in Java and integrates and consolidates data from third-party management systems. Its object-oriented design makes it transparent to other management tools on the network and provides two-way access to all of the information generated by them. With object correlation, Formula can provide centralized scripting and automation responses across the network.

Why it matters: "They do an excellent job taking a business focus on the information that enterprises are trying to manage," says Steve Foote, president and CEO of research firm Enswers.com Inc. "They go beyond managing information on the hardware level to the business level, and create business-oriented objects. By treating customer, general ledger, customer relationship management, and accounts receivable [items] as objects, IT can help provide more business core-value reporting," Foote says.

Peakstone Corp.
The focus: Peakstone's eAssurance products are designed to help companies not only deliver on their Internet service-assurance levels, but ensure that those service levels are tightly integrated with core business objectives. eAssurance enables E-businesses and Internet and application service providers to offer customized, predictable, committed, and differentiated service levels.

Why it matters: According to Barb Goldworm, a director with Enterprise Management Associates, Peakstone's adaptive control for the E-business infrastructure goes beyond traditional network management, with the application of adaptive control techniques. "Real-time control techniques automatically adapt to environmental changes (for example, surges in demand or unexpected network congestion) to keep E-business infrastructure operating according to predefined policies," she says.

Swan International Inc.
The focus: With more than 400,000 worldwide users of its application management software, called Vision64, Swan International provides solutions that ensure that applications on desktops and servers throughout the network remain operational. Swan offers products for software delivery, content delivery, and integrity control management.

Why it matters: Goldworm says the French company has a feature-rich product line--in particular, the integrity control solution's ability to automatically fix problems caused by deletion or corruption of software files on users' systems, including mobile workers. Swan provides "good flexibility, but with-out the long implementation cycles of framework or platform solutions," she says.

System Management Arts Inc.
The focus: Through its patented codebook correlation technology, System Management Arts, or Smarts, helps automate problem diagnosis and event impact analysis with its InCharge network management applications. The company recently announced InCharge 3.2, software that provides real-time, out-of-the-box availability and performance management, flexible application configuration without programming, and broader support for vendor hardware.

With release 3.2, InCharge automatically looks for more than 100 critical performance and availability problems. The software identifies root cause issues and provides early warnings for conditions that may turn into problems.

Why it matters: "Smarts was one of the first companies to take a true root cause analysis approach to network management," Foote says. "With its software, companies can pinpoint the exact nature of a problem, instead of being barraged with a shower of warning alarms."