PacketSentry’s Compliance, Audit Controls Bypass Expensive, Risky Modifications

PacketMotion, pioneers of User Activity Management, announced the availability of new audit and compliance controls for the mainframe environment with the company’s low-risk, operationally efficient PacketSentry solution that manages network/application activity down to the user level.

PacketMotion’s PacketSentry solution creates an audit trail of every mainframe screen accessed via Telnet 3270 (TN3270) as well as what was entered on each screen by individual users. Crucially, the solution decodes mainframe user IDs, thereby reporting on specific mainframe user activities. For example, audit controls can be easily implemented to track activity of “elevated privilege” or superuser accounts normally used to modify applications or perform direct database updates. Furthermore, the audit trail is correlated with the Microsoft Windows domain IDs of the end users, so that mainframe account misuse or sharing is easily detected and stopped.

Enables Clients to Analyze Unstructured and Structured Information, Reduce Costs and Make Smarter Business Decisions

IBM announced new business analytics offerings designed to help clients better manage and control their unstructured and structured data in a unified manner, while providing valuable insight into their content across the enterprise.

The volume of unstructured data found on Web sites and social networking sites, in digital files, WebSphere Portal, Microsoft SharePoint, databases and customer comments, is increasing exponentially. Typically, organizations manage this unstructured information separately from their structured data found in applications and databases. By compiling and analyzing both structured and unstructured information, organizations can garner business insights from unlimited volumes of text from e-mails, documents, blogs, wikis and websites and change the way they do business.

IBM’s new offerings provide clients with the ability to access and analyze unstructured information that can be found inside and outside their organization. The analytic offerings allow business users to find and gain insight from virtually any type of content - in any format - by extracting, sorting, filtering and categorizing key information and making the content relevant so organizations can more effectively make market-driven business decisions.

Since launching the first comprehensive vision of Business Service Management, BMC Software has been a driving force in simplifying and automating IT management. BMC is taking the next big step forward in the future of enterprise IT management -- Dynamic BSM.

For years, BSM has proven effective at helping customers increase the business impact of IT, improve transparency and quality of service, manage risk and reduce IT cost. Adoption has continued to escalate, gaining steam even as macroeconomic pressures have mounted around the globe. Today, BSM is at the top of the IT agenda for many of the world’s largest organizations. In addition to technical superiority across the many parts of the BSM platform, BMC’s approach to BSM is differentiated by its ability to be adopted incrementally in accordance with customers’ critical initiatives such as data center automation, virtualization and cloud computing and mainframe cost optimization.

BSM enables IT organizations to manage the complete lifecycle of business services from service definition and business prioritization through service request and support, provisioning and configuration, proactive monitoring and operations, as well as planning and governance. BMC’s BSM platform is hardware and software agnostic so that IT leaders can manage a broad range of technology from a single, unified management platform.

These differences represent a significant departure from competing IT management solutions that are not unified in their approach, lack third-party integration and are unable to meet the heterogeneous management demands of customers across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud-based resources.

CA announced plans to deliver Cross Enterprise Application Performance Management, a comprehensive solution for managing application performance in real time across mainframe and distributed environments. The solution will combine the strengths of CA Wily APM and CA SYSVIEW® to offer deep visibility into transactions across mainframe and distributed systems, and provide functionality designed to help customers more rapidly detect and resolve application performance problems before they impact service levels or revenue streams.

Continuous availability and high performance of applications is critical for customer retention and overall business success in today's highly competitive markets. CA’s Cross Enterprise APM can help IT organizations optimize performance and availability by measuring the experience of end users and providing a comprehensive understanding of how the distributed and mainframe computing resources along the transaction path are affecting that experience.

CA announced "Day One" support for IBM's z/VM 6.1 across its industry-leading mainframe systems, security, and storage management product lines—continuing its record of immediate support for new releases of the VM operating system. This immediate support helps CA customers and business partners reap the full benefits of the new platform's features without delay.

z/VM V6.1 is optimized for consolidating workloads on System z10 servers, allowing IT organizations to build dynamic data center infrastructures that are exceptionally resilient, cost-effective, and capable of being flexibly expanded and contracted as necessary to meet changing business needs. Organizations are increasingly consolidating workloads to the mainframe and relying on z/VM to provide the virtualization and resource-sharing capabilities to optimally exploit the power of Linux on System z®.

CA offers a comprehensive set of z/VM v6.1 solutions that streamline and automate the management and security of this proven virtualization platform. These solutions help customers optimize z/VM and Linux on System z resources, reduce costs, protect critical data, secure systems resources, and align utilization to shifting demand patterns.

A significant factor in CA’s ability to consistently provide Day One support for new IBM operating system releases is its employment of advanced development and quality assurance methodologies. By facilitating central management of integration across product lines and global operations, these methodologies enable rapid delivery of high quality management solutions designed to interoperate seamlessly with new releases of IBM’s operating systems.

BMC Software announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Tideway Systems Limited, a leading provider of IT discovery solutions. The acquisition will enhance BMC’s Business Service Management platform and help organizations minimize the risks associated with business-critical initiatives such as data center consolidation, virtualization and compliance.

The new offering supports the complete set of discovery requirements for BSM and features deep integration with BMC’s Atrium Configuration Management Database based on Tideway’s long-time membership in BMC’s Technology Alliance Partner program. This presents customers an in-depth understanding of the relationships and dependencies of their physical assets and applications not currently available from any other vendor.

The addition of Tideway technology provides BMC customers with the industry’s largest open library of predefined IT configuration discovery patterns. These patterns provide out of the box descriptions of software and hardware resources that allow IT organizations to automatically identify and characterize their environment and map related application dependencies and services.

When combined with the BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping solution, BMC will deliver unmatched visibility into the data center and rapidly reduce the time and resources required to model, manage and maintain applications and services. This is critical for IT organizations that are transitioning applications and services to cloud computing environments.

BMC expects the transaction to close within the week.

CA Inc. announced that Crédit Mutuel Arkéa is leveraging CA’s industry-leading Mainframe 2.0 management solutions—including CA Mainframe Software Manager --to streamline its mainframe operations. By doing so, the bank expects to reduce IT costs while also improving the delivery of IT services across the enterprise.

Crédit Mutuel Arkéa federates several regional subsidiaries—including Crédit Mutuel de Bretagne, federations in the Sud-Ouest and Massif Central regions, and approximately 20 specialised subsidiaries. CA’s Mainframe 2.0 solutions will enable the bank to rationalize its mainframe management software portfolio.

One of the key new Mainframe 2.0 solutions that Crédit Mutuel Arkéa is implementing as part of its new plan is CA MSM. CA MSM will enable the bank to install and maintain CA software for the IBM® z/OS® platform via a simple web interface. CA MSM also proactively provides information on necessary updates and drastically reduces administrative burdens. As a result, the bank expects to improve staff productivity and better maintain the health of its mainframe environment.

Compuware is looking to bring in Web application monitoring capabilities and fill its quality and testing gap all in a single swoop.

The company signed a definitive agreement to acquire application performance management company Gomez for US$295 million in cash. The acquisition is expected to close in November.

Compuware president and COO Bob Paul said that Compuware has lacked application monitoring capabilities beyond the firewall, and users hit a blind spot when trying to monitor Internet or cloud applications. Gomez adds those Web application performance views, letting users view content delivery networks and ISP providers. Additionally, Gomez’s platform can be used in quality and testing.

Back in May, Compuware sold its testing and QA product line to Micro Focus, because the company believed quality and testing wasn’t a key area and was expensive to maintain. Paul said that Compuware had a “diluted focus” around its investments in quality and testing, mainframe, and IT portfolio management.

Progress DataDirect, the data-infrastructure division of Progress Software Corporation, a leading software provider that enables enterprises to be operationally responsive, announced it has entered into a strategic partnership with Mainline Information Systems, Inc., a leading provider of IBM servers, storage and software solutions. Under the terms of the agreement, Mainline will offer the industry-leading mainframe integration middleware, Progress DataDirect Shadow to its customers looking for cost-effective mainframe modernization through SOA enablement and legacy-data integration.

The DataDirect Shadow product is a single, unified platform built exclusively for integration with IBM System z mainframes. The high-performance foundation architecture supports all major industry-standard requirements for integrating mainframe data, business logic, and screens with SOAs and composite application development initiatives. The DataDirect Shadow platform uses patent-pending technology to expand the utilization of the IBM System z Integrated Information Processor specialty engine to additional workloads beyond DB2, including the non-relational mainframe databases Adabas, IMS/DB, IDMS and VSAM, as well SOAP/XML parsing necessary for creating Web services within the mainframe to applications residing within CICS, IMS/TM, IDMS and Natural.

Since its founding in 1989, Mainline has experienced outstanding growth by providing solid technology solutions and high levels of service to its customers. By offering the DataDirect Shadow platform, Mainline expands its offerings to continue to meet the infrastructure, environment and business needs of its customers while helping keep technology budgets in-check. Internal benchmark testing by Progress DataDirect has shown up to 99 percent of the processing associated with SOA integration, SQL data queries, Change Data Capture (CDC) for events and Web-enablement can be diverted from the mainframe’s General Purpose Processor (GPP) to be handled by the zIIP specialty engine – which does the work without using any of the mainframe licensed MIPs capacity. This is an attractive proposition for organizations looking to lower mainframe total-cost-of-ownership and for existing Mainline zIIP accounts who can now realize the benefit of DataDirect Shadow for data sources in addition to DB2.

Compuware Corporation announced the release of Hiperstation 7.8, the centerpiece of Compuware’s Application Auditing solution. This new version expands Hiperstation’s capabilities with the integration of Vantage, Compuware’s end-to-end application performance management solution, and the addition of WebSphere MQ and TCP/IP protocols. The new functionality allows organizations to more effectively protect against internal data breaches--across platforms--averting monetary losses and meeting regulations including PCI and HIPAA.

A 2008 survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute shows insiders caused 75 percent of all breaches in the U.S. while external hackers committed only one percent of breaches. The Uncertainty of Data Breach Detection, report, commissioned by Compuware, also reveals 79 percent of U.S. respondents had experienced at least one data breach.

Compuware's Application Auditing solution acts like a surveillance camera by recording internal activity between users and business applications. Hiperstation 7.8 improves an organization’s ability to stop internal breaches by expanding the amount of information provided to auditors through increased coverage of application activity.