Systems management technology innovator Configuresoft, Inc. today unveiled its Configuration IntelligenceT initiative, a breakthrough technology that correlates diverse configuration, provisioning and service desk information into actionable analytics needed to optimize and secure IT investments and services.

Much in the same manner that business intelligence solutions mine diverse information from disparate data warehouses, Configuration Intelligence delivers a new set of IT analytics that correlates and reports systems behavior. Developed jointly with Configuresoft customers, some of the largest enterprises in the world, these analytics not only validate rapid systems changes, but also highlight trends, signal potential problems and better prepare organizations to capitalize on new technologies like virtualization and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). These advanced analytics bring a new level of insight into enterprise IT infrastructure, enabling users to ask and answer questions that simply were not possible or even considered within the limitations of older management systems.

"At ConocoPhillips, we constantly search for ways to improve efficiency and stability across the IT infrastructure," said Michael Malaby with ConocoPhillips Global Information Services. "I believe the ability to easily correlate systems configuration data with event and performance data is a significant step forward, and will provide us with the opportunity to take our infrastructure to a higher level of optimization and further align systems management with strategic business initiatives."

How Configuration Intelligence Works

The first product release under the Configuration Intelligence initiative adds tight integration between Configuresoft's award-winning Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM) product line and BMC Remedy (service desk), Microsoft SMS (provisioning), and EMC VMware (virtualization) software. More importantly, it mines, normalizes and correlates information stored both in the ECM configuration database and other service desk, provisioning and management systems. Configuration Intelligence then delivers a series of "Intelligence Briefs" critical to enterprise-wide systems management. The briefs:

• Highlight the overall general trends of changes, and change alerts taking place across sites, business units, operating systems, hardware vendors, logical or virtual machine groups.
• Correlate inband and out-of-band changes and their relationship to critical systems and security events occurring organization-wide, especially the number and type of service desk incident and trouble tickets.
• Signal (with user defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)), significant or alarming changes in the percentage of systems successfully patched or compliant.
• Evaluate the impact of IT processes such as change, security, and remediation have on the quality of service delivered to the business.
• Prepare organizations with accurate, normalized facts and strategic insight needed for major strategic computing initiatives, including moves to server virtualization and major OS upgrades and migrations.

"Organizations have embraced a wide variety of process improvement initiatives like ITIL, Six Sigma and ISO, which increase availability and improve service quality. At the same time, little exists to measure the success of those improvements and predict how new technology initiatives like virtualization will rattle these processes," said Andi Mann, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "Configuration Intelligence is a bold move to solve significant blind spots and break downs across the systems management lifecycle. It not only measures how the organization is doing, but also delivers the analytics providing deep insight that lets them take aggressive, yet safe moves in their computing environments based on real behavioral information."

Opens Eyes to Virtualization Complexity and Management Struggles

According to IDC Research, the virtualization market will reach $20 billion by 2010. The new technology promises to cut server costs and optimize existing hardware for enterprises. At the same time, virtual systems introduce vast new levels of complexity and rapid, dynamic change that create significant systems management challenges.

"Just when organizations thought they had systems configuration management and compliance stabilized and under control, virtualization burst in, changing everything and injecting widespread complexity as virtual systems flip on across the enterprise," said Dennis Moreau, CTO of Configuresoft. "Virtual environments rapidly accelerate change, requiring a dramatic shift in management practices to keep up and prevent organizations from slipping into chaos. You simply need more intimate operational and strategic insight into how these virtual configurations are inter-related across operating systems, application and resources."

Armed with ECM and Configuration Intelligence, organizations gain deep insight into how new initiatives like virtualizations are faring --- and how to best stabilize, secure and optimize these new environments. It helps organizations stay ahead of rapidly changing virtualized systems and business critical applications and the associated systems configuration changes.