August 7, 2000

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Netuitive Predicts Performance Problems

Product is designed to identify potential failures hours before they occur

By George V. Hulme

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ow valuable would it be to know that your company's Web site was going to crash tomorrow--say sometime around three in the afternoon? Especially if you also knew why the system was going to crash? Netuitive Inc. this week is introducing a product that it says will do just that.

Netuitive 5.0 is designed to identify potential system failures up to 24 hours before they occur. The system analyzes and correlates information streams from network, system, and application sources, then predicts situations that may pose performance issues.

ZoomTown.com provides a digital subscriber line network to more than 30,000 subscribers and is adding 1,000 new ones a week. Jeff Carr, director of operations for ZoomTown.com, a subsidiary of Broadwing Inc., uses Netuitive to help predict system failures and says the software has reduced help-desk support calls by alerting the company of problems before they occur. "Each support call costs $10," says Carr. "By using Netuitive, we're prepared to predict and prevent potential problems before they impact our subscribers and the phone rings."

The program helped uncover at least one major network problem. ZoomTown .com has a billing system running connected to an Oracle database and integrated into its E-mail system. Carr says that on some evenings, the E-mail system got bogged down and the company had trouble identifying the cause, resulting in a flurry of help-desk calls. Netuitive 5.0 made the correlation between the poor system performance and a database-maintenance program the company had scheduled a few nights a week, Carr says.

Netuitive 5.0, available now, runs on Windows NT and Windows 2000 servers, and uses a Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 or Oracle8 database to store data, predictions, and alerts. Prices start at around $100,000

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