In a move to help companies improve the performance of applications written for the Java 2 Enterprise Edition platform, Mercury Interactive Corp. on Monday will introduce Optane for J2EE. Optane is designed to reduce the time spent finding and fixing software errors, thus helping companies mitigate the risk of introducing new code into their IT environments, says Oren Ariel, Mercury Interactive's chief technology officer.

By year's end, EPL Inc., a provider of data-processing software and services for credit unions, plans to port all of its Windows-based Unisys mainframe servers to Sun systems running apps written in the J2EE environment. "The entire ipower (Sun Web development) solution tested with Optane in a proactive manner has allowed us to increase margins from 10% to 60%," says EPL CIO Michael Stoeckert. These increased margins come primarily from a decrease in development costs, improvement in quality, and "running on an open-systems platform like J2EE on Solaris."

Optane for J2EE is a valuable tool for the platform, says Meta Group VP Corey Ferengul. "It provides a one-to-one interface designed for testing, validating, and monitoring apps written to J2EE," he says. "Because J2EE apps are still immature and are more modular than other apps, they're more frequently updated."