Mercury Finds The Motive To Make Systems Management Easy

Simple systems management has become a Holy Grail to IT executives. Vendors have talked about it a lot, and some small, focused vendors help with pieces. But frameworks still sit as shelfware at many companies, and administrators log lots of hours.

Mercury Interactive Corp., trying to rise up from app management and testing to make the whole infrastructure easier to manage, got help from Motive Communications Inc. on Monday. Mercury will license modeling technology from Motive and integrate it with its own app-management software.

Motive offers just-in-time modeling of business services and the background infrastructure, especially relationships among applications, databases, and hardware components.

One analyst thinks Motive could replace mapping that was very labor-intensive because of manual administration and an ever-changing network. Jasmine Noel at Jnoel Associates says the bigger management vendors are waking up to the problem, as Collation, Computer Associates (with the Sonar tool next year), Motive, and Troux Technologies could all automate that mapping function. "Once that map is created automatically," she says, "systems management becomes easy."