INTERCONNECTS

SMARTS, the leading provider of automated real-time business assurance solutions, and BladeLogic, the number one provider of data center automation software, announced a global alliance today that brings self-healing systems management capabilities to data centers and allows IT organizations to accelerate the drive toward a more efficient utility computing model. The agreement enables customers to easily leverage both SMARTS InCharge(TM) and BladeLogic Operations Manager(TM) to automatically provision, change, monitor, diagnose, and repair application infrastructure, giving IT managers unparalleled visibility and control to improve service responsiveness and reduce operational costs. "With the growing trend toward real-time infrastructure, companies are demanding ways to automate the time-consuming process of managing application infrastructure -- from provisioning servers and applications, to proactively finding and analyzing problems, to auto-correction and compliance assurance," said Ronni Colville, Research Director at Gartner. "Having these capabilities integrated can improve mission critical application availability by shortening time-to-resolve outages or performance degradation, thus quickly and cost- effectively responding to increasing business demands." Through the agreement, which includes product integration and sales collaboration, customers can quickly implement industry-leading capabilities for efficiently managing complex and distributed application infrastructure. SMARTS' InCharge(TM) common information model and intelligent event correlation engine reveals interactions between the network elements, systems, applications, services, and customers they support. InCharge proactively recognizes underlying service-affecting problems and immediately calculates their impact on the business, allowing problem resolution to be prioritized based on service impact. In turn, BladeLogic Operations Manager automates corrective action across thousands of servers and their corresponding applications according to service level agreements or configuration policies for compliance or security. For example, data centers can easily provision new servers and application releases, install patches, or disable insecure services or ports. Together, by integrating SMARTS' fault analysis and BladeLogic's change automation capabilities, the products give customers the ability to automate the lifecycle of managing a dynamic application environment in a proactive and self-healing manner, enabling superior levels of security, responsiveness and cost effectiveness. "SMARTS and BladeLogic share a very similar goal -- to strip out the complexity and high cost of managing today's application infrastructure through intelligence-driven data center automation," said SMARTS Roger Pilc, Chief Operating Officer. "By combining the strengths of two market leaders with complementary solutions, our customers can leverage the most cutting-edge and comprehensive solution in the market today to assure high application uptime and rapid mean-time-to-repair." "Most systems management automation has been limited to only monitoring infrastructure to identify problems leaving diagnosis and resolution to time- consuming, costly and error-prone manual processes," said Dev Ittycheria, President and CEO of BladeLogic. "But with increasing infrastructure complexity, rising service level expectations and escalating pressure to cut costs, IT organizations now require an integrated and highly automated approach to problem detection, business impact analysis, and resolution according to business policies. The alliance between BladeLogic and SMARTS provides customers with a proven and compelling solution to address this fundamental management problem."