BladeLogic, Inc., the leading provider of next-generation data
centre automation software, today announced at the Gartner
Symposium/ITxpo the general availability of BladeLogic Orchestration
Manager(TM), a new software product that provides run-time event, data
exchange and workflow integration between BladeLogic's award-winning
suite of data centre automation software and other best-of-breed
management software tools found in the data centre.
IT organisations today have invested in many different management
tools to support different management functions in such areas as
problem management, incident management and change management, and
more recently, configuration management and release management.
However, all these systems have different interfaces and islands of
data. Consequently, IT personnel have to spend an excessive amount of
time moving between multiple tools in order to gather necessary
information or manually duplicate data in order for them to accomplish
their tasks. Furthermore, during critical service-impacting outages,
correlating data across different tools in a timely manner is nearly
impossible. This disjointed approach adds operational costs, increases
the risk of human errors and impairs the IT organisation's ability to
evolve from a device management to a service management orientation to
better support the business.
As organisations put more focus on automating the data centre, the
need to align and integrate disparate tools to match the underlying
management processes becomes even more critical. BladeLogic
Orchestration Manager allows for the development of workflows to
address specific management processes across different functional
groups in the data centre. Additionally, it enables the seamless
integration of BladeLogic's suite of data centre automation software
with other major enterprise management applications, such as service
desk, event correlation, monitoring/fault management, asset management
and other device-specific tools. By doing so, BladeLogic Orchestration
Manager enables IT organisations to leverage the full business
benefits of automation. Moreover, it allows customers to reduce the
risk of being locked into a single vendor solution by seamlessly
integrating best-of-breed management tools with minimal effort and at
a very low cost.
BladeLogic Orchestration Manager provides out-of-the-box adapters
that enable IT organisations to instantly integrate to numerous data
centre management systems, such as:
-- Service Desk Systems--To integrate processes such as incident,
problem and change management
-- Service Monitoring Systems--To integrate problem management
and change management
-- Enterprise Consoles--To integrate incident and change
management
-- Asset Management Systems/Configuration Management Databases
(CMDBs)--To integrate best-of-breed CMDBs at an
enterprise-level using a federated approach
-- Network Configuration Management Systems--To integrate
configuration change and compliance assurance across networks,
servers and applications
Included with BladeLogic Orchestration Manager is a "development
kit" to extend integration to other point tools and home-grown
applications by leveraging pre-built adapters based on common
protocols such as IMAPv4, SQL, JMS, Telnet and SFTP.
"Today's data centres consist of many different management tools
from multiple vendors performing multiple specialized tasks," said
David Williams, Research Vice President, Gartner. "In order to
integrate people, process and tools for data centre management, many
IT organisations use run books or other manual means. However, this
approach is time-consuming, error-prone and often results in prolonged
service outages, delays and increased operating costs. By implementing
a solution which automates the integration of people, process
and multi-vendor tools, IT organisations can create a unified IT
environment consisting of best-of-breed applications. The end result
is a much more efficient and responsive IT organisation."
Using BladeLogic Orchestration Manager, IT organisations can now
address true cross-functional service management initiatives related
to best practices such as IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Control
Objectives for Information and Technology (COBIT), and enable the
deployment and use of more complete and accurate configuration
management databases (CMDBs). In addition, Orchestration Manager
adapts to policies and procedures that have already been painstakingly
defined and tuned by IT organisations over a long period of time,
rather than forcing organisations to change policies and procedures to
work around a specific product.
"By offering a flexible platform that allows IT organisations to
more efficiently integrate a wide variety of management tools,
BladeLogic Orchestration Manager enables these organisations to derive
significantly more value from their existing investments," said Vijay
Manwani, Chief Technology Officer, BladeLogic. "IT organisations can
now use BladeLogic as the integration focal point for existing tools
in the data centre while preserving a "best-of-breed" management
strategy to create a next-generation data centre management
environment."
To see a demonstration of Orchestration Manager, please visit
BladeLogic in booth #1117 at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando,
Florida, October 9-12.
About BladeLogic
BladeLogic is the leading provider of next-generation data centre
automation software with the largest installed base of Global 2000 and
other leading customers, including such organisations as Capgemini,
E*Trade, Expedia, HSBC, Lockheed Martin, priceline.com, Time Warner,
VeriSign, Virgin Mobile and Walmart.com. BladeLogic's award-winning
suite of enterprise-class data centre automation solutions enables
organisations of any size to achieve continuous configuration
compliance across large-scale, distributed server and application
environments, resulting in dramatically reduced data centre operating
costs, improved service quality, increased efficiencies, and enhanced
compliance and security. BladeLogic is a privately held company
headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts, USA. For more information,
please visit www.bladelogic.com.
