VitAL Magazine

VitAL Magazine is a UK based business to business journal for senior professionals who are concerned about the business issues surrounding the implementation of IT.

Published by 31 Media on a bi-monthly basis VitAL Magazine is distributed to senior level professionals who are concerned with the impact IT is having on the business.

Each issue of VitAL Magazine is packed with thought leadership articles, opinion pieces, case studies, dynamic news stories, research findings, and witty columns, that cover pressing topics that include helpdesk systems, asset management, ITIL, configuration management database (CMBD), general IT & Business Service management; right the way through to corporate social responsibility.

With an unparalleled circulation just shy of 10,000 directors and senior managers is a must read for anyone concerned about the connotations IT is having on the modern business.

The role of VitAL Magazine is that of information provider and voice of the industry. Our mission is to ensure our readers benefit from independent, insightful, and cutting edge editorial that reflects new thinking in an ever changing market. Each issue's aim is to give our readers vision, inspiration, and the knowledge required to re-think and implement new strategies that improve the overall performance of the business.

If you would like to subscribe to VitAL Magazine please visit www.vital-mag.net and click on the subscriptions tab. UKCMG members can also benefit from at 50% discount.

Action Software GmbH

We are an established software company based in Cham, Switzerland, specialising in mainframe z/OS solutions in the areas of Security, Availability, Auditability and Change Management. These unique offerings are designed both for MVS and USS (UNIX System Services).

Our products eventACTION (formerly Change Action) and ussACTION, comprising several basic elements

• eventACTION Change Tracker
• eventACTION Change Manager
• eventACTION Reference Tracker
• eventACTION Command Manager
• ussACTION Change Tracker
• ussACTION Change Manager
• ussACTION Reference Tracker

have been implemented and used highly effectively for many years by organisations such as: Pentagon, Federal Reserve Bank and Citicorp. eventACTION is the ideal solution, precisely for those corporations where Security, Controls, Auditing and Availability are treated with the utmost priority. The Sarbanes Oxley and COBIT guidelines mean that eventACTION and ussACTION are essential for your organisation in order to enforce these requirements on your z/OS systems. Please contact us in order to ascertain how advantageous shorter Recovery-Times, and the resulting Savings (Costs & Personnel) could be for your organisation.

Up to date information on our products can be found on our Web Site and a white paper showing how to meet the Sarbanes Oxley requirement can be downloaded at: http://www.actionsoftware.ch/Sarbanes Oxley Flyer.pdf

CA Wily Technology

A division of CA, Wily is the market-leading provider of Enterprise Application Management solutions. By providing end-to-end visibility into customer transactions in real time, Wily's products enable companies to successfully manage the health and availability of their critical web applications and Infrastructure. Wily's collaborative management approach allows enterprises to rapidly detect and diagnose application slowdowns and failures, and better assess the impact of application performance on business success. This means better customer service, more stable revenue streams, and higher IT productivity. Wily Technology is a division of CA's Enterprise Systems Management (ESM) unit, which delivers best-in-class services support, service delivery and financial asset management solutions to help organisations control costs while maintaining optimum IT capabilities to learn more about Wily, visit http://www.wilytech.com

CPT Global

CPT Global specialises in providing capacity and performance management services. The name CPT Global comes from the abbreviation of Capacity Planning, Performance Tuning and Testing.

The company was founded in Australia in 1993, and is now listed on the ASX. With more than 100 large clients worldwide, CPT offers a wide range of services related to IT efficiencies.

In Europe, CPT is focused on mainframe Performance Tuning, but also provides expertise in Management of IT, and Open Systems. CPT has offices in the UK, Holland and Germany, with projects at clients such as Lufthansa, Prudential, Bank of Ireland, UBS, Credit Swiss, ING, ABN Amro, Deutsche Bahn, Lloyds TSB, and AIB

CPT uses a network of over 200 specialist consultants, many of whom are world-leaders in their fields. The depth of experience provided from the work done at the wide range of clients allows CPT to quickly identify performance and capacity problems, and to design and implement practical cost-effective solutions.

We expect to make CPU savings of 15-30% at most clients, but understand that many clients are cautious about such claims. We therefore offer the option of Risk/Reward assignments, where we are only paid out of savings actually achieved.

Capacitas

Capacitas recognises the importance of ICT service performance to the contemporary business. The reliance on technology in the modern economy is never as noticeable as when it cannot meet the business requirements, preventing businesses from operating effectively, or causing them to fail completely. Central to all ICT success is service performance, which is the successful application of several associated disciplines concurrently; system architecture and design, application development, capacity planning and management, service level management, availability management, financial management and business continuity management.

At Capacitas we specialise in performance engineering and capacity planning of ICT applications and infrastructure across the entire end-to-end lifecycle, from concept, design and development, through live usage to decommissioning. We help our customers to fully realise their potential by meeting their business objectives whilst ensuring appropriate ICT investment. We employ industry experts with recognised technical and business skills to assist our customers with their ICT projects, help them overcome their challenges and achieve their strategies and objectives.

Compuware

Compuware Corporation, a multi-billion dollar company, provides business value through software and professional services that optimise productivity and reduce costs across the application life cycle. Meeting the rapidly changing needs of businesses of all sizes, Compuware's market-leading solutions improve the quality, ease the integration and enhance the performance of distributed, e-business and enterprise software.

Compuware's suite of products, improves application performance by identifying, troubleshooting and preventing performance problems. With continuous monitoring of servers and databases, network application traffic and end-user response times, identifying performance slowdowns-before your customers are affected.

EPV Technologies

Speed up and improve your performance management and capacity planning process with Enterprise Performance Vision (EPV).

EPV is a suite of products to manage performance and capacity planning in z/OS, UNIX and Windows environments. These products deliver enterprise wide information and cross reference to your browser. Using the highlighted links you can identify modifications in hardware and software configurations, changes in throughput and productivity, resource consumption, and workloads.

This is a proven Capacity Planning and Performance Management approach that will assist you in achieving an optimised and stable environment, quickly and easily. See products for more detailed information.

Distributed in the UK and Ireland by Inspired Solutions

HyPerformix, Inc.

predicting the impact of change

HyPerformix is a service-oriented performance and capacity management software company focused on the needs of Global 2000 enterprises who share three common goals:

1. Deliver applications that meet performance objectives
2. Maximise IT investments
3. Manage the risk of constant change

HyPerformix helps reach these goals through a proactive approach to performance and capacity management that provides a service-oriented view across the entire application life cycle. This end-to-end view of the application ensures alignment between IT resources and business needs that meet both performance and financial objectives.

Using the HyPerformix Integrated Performance Suite. (IPS) to build software models of existing or proposed infrastructure, various workload and configuration scenarios can be simulated, and their impact on user performance can be analysed.

IPS helps manage tradeoffs throughout the application.s life cycle by making changes . such as modifying network bandwidth, adding or removing servers, relocating applications, changing configuration parameters, or varying workloads . then seeing predicted performance and utilisation metrics.

By asking a series of .what-ifs. and seeing their impact in a virtual environment, IPS provides the information needed to make the best possible deployment decisions and strike the perfect balance between cost and performance.

IBM

IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key IBM Business Partners, IBM is aligned around a single, focused business model: innovation. IBM takes its breadth and depth of insight on issues, processes and operations across a variety of industries, and invents and applies technology to help solve its clients' most intractable business and competitive problems. Although we remain committed, as ever, to lead the development of state-of-the-art technologies, and the products and service offerings built around them, we measure ourselves today by how well we help clients solve their biggest and most pressing problems. IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to take full advantage of the new era of on demand business. Indeed IBM has the world's second largest software business, and is the leading provider of middleware...from software brands such as Tivoli; Rational; WebSphere; Information Management and Lotus. IBM Software is open, scalable, secure and industry focused. Our software products and industry solutions help innovate and become more flexible, while making the most of current resources and controlling costs. For more information on IBM and its Software Products, please visit http://www.ibm.com/uk/.

Macro 4

For your critical business applications, Macro 4 is the software specialist that enables performance improvement by making the complex simple.

This approach has developed through our dedication to understanding user needs over the 40 years Macro 4 has been serving its customers.

Improving the performance of critical business applications can be a challenge. Applying cutting edge technology to gain competitive advantage must be balanced by the selection of robust and reliable solutions to minimise risk. Macro 4 delivers this balance; developing and delivering world class solutions while striving to reduce complexity to ensure you get more, simply.

Metron

Metron.s Athene provides fully integrated, performance monitoring, alerting, analysis, management, reporting and capacity planning for UNIX, Linux, Windows Servers and z/OS mainframes.

DEMONSTRATING:- ATHENE 7.5 FOR ITIL CAPACITY MANAGEMENT

Key features:

• Dashboard for Business, Service and Resource Capacity Management
• Enhanced reporting for metaviews on thousands of nodes
• Enhanced support for ITIL Service Level & Availability Management

ITIL Support

Used widely for Resource Level Capacity Management, Athene features a range of enhancements to facilitate Service Level and Business Level Capacity Management.

Metron has been associated with the development of the ITIL guidelines since their inception in the eighties and drafted the original workbook for Capacity Management.

Athene ITIL Capacity Modelling Plug-In for HP OpenView

HP OpenView performance agent data (OVPA) can be integrated with Metron.s Athene ITIL Capacity Management software to provide an analytical modelling plug-in for HP OpenView enabling organisations to maximise their investment in HP OpenView by providing a more comprehensive and fully ITIL conforming capacity management solution for their business.

The world.s leading Outsourcing Companies and half the UK.s top 100 Companies are saving millions using Athene combined with expert ITIL consultancy and training services as a key element of their Service Management and Delivery.

Neptuny

Neptuny is a leading Service and Solutions provider supporting corporate enterprises in IT performance management activities. Established in 2000, the company has strong roots in academic research and business consulting and an in-depth understanding of IT and Network performance as well as capacity planning issues in large scale enterprises.

Neptuny's Caplan? is an enterprise capacity management and reporting suite that enables proactive decisions about IT architectures and applications on a quantitative basis.

The company offers a wide range of services on performance evaluation, optimization, capacity planning and IT governance.

Leading IPTV players, TLC operators and top European financial groups are using Neptuny's platforms and services to ensure the best quality of experience to their customers.

OpTier

OpTier™ provides software solutions that dynamically link business services to underlying IT infrastructure, assuring service delivery and optimizing IT resources. Its unique Business Transaction Management™ technology – which delivers end-to-end visibility and control of all business transactions – makes effective Business Service Management a reality. OpTier tracks and monitors all business transactions – across all tiers, all the time. It identifies and isolates performance problems as they develop, thus minimizing the cost to resolve them. OpTier generates intelligence, for more effective testing, capacity planning, provisioning and decision-making. It can further prioritize transaction resource allocation based on business needs. For more information, visit www.optier.com.

Purple Griffon

Purple Griffon provide high quality service management training and consultancy solutions specialising in ITIL training. We offer the entire range of accredited courses including overviews, foundations, practioners and managers.

Our team of experts has a skill base which covers the full set of service management disciplines, gained across a wide number of industry sectors.

SAS

SAS is the leader in business intelligence software and services. Customers at 40,000 sites, including 96 of the top 100 FORTUNE Global 500 companies, use SAS software to manage and gain insights from vast amounts of data, resulting in faster, more accurate business decisions, more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers, compliance with governmental regulations, research breakthroughs and better products. Only SAS offers leading data integration, intelligence storage, advanced analytics and traditional business intelligence applications within a comprehensive enterprise intelligence platform. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know.

SightLine Systems

For when Service Levels REALLY matter, SightLine is there to help you maintain them. SightLine helps you achieve ITIL compliance by providing real-time performance data for instant problem resolution, and longer term data for trending and capacity planning. SightLine Systems (Europe) are the new distributors for SightLine throughout EMEA. Some older faces, and some newer ones, but above all else, a desire to help our customers succeed in their ITIL implementations and their IT service delivery. Let us bring over 20 years of managing systems, infrastructures and service levels to your organisation.

Software (Europe) Ltd

Since 1989, Software Europe has provided products to help organisations optimise on their operational efficiency, security and asset management.

Operations

Our operational solutions encompass performance and tuning, storage management and disaster recovery. They enable organizations to preserve and extend the value of their investments in the mainframe environment by streamlining operations and increasing efficiency. Our aim is to help you optimize resources and system performance whilst improving the flexibility and scalability of your mainframe systems.

Asset Management

Our asset management products help you to more effectively manage and control your IT assets, whilst uncovering costs savings opportunities and demonstrating compliance. Proactive contract and asset management ensures you only pay for the products you use, enabling you to retain control of your annual budget spend.

Our web based contract management solution allows your organisation to manage your contracts whilst our leading software inventory and usage monitoring solution will identify and report on all the software assets you have across the enterprise.

Security

We provide security solutions for both Mainframe and Enterprise. Our mainframe products fall into 3 main categories: Administration, Auditing and Encryption, our enterprise product concentrates on effective Auditing.

We have created an exceptional level of customer satisfaction and loyalty and our product support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.

For more information call 01522 881300 or visit http://www.software-europe.co.uk

Sysload Software

Sysload Software provides performance management software for the increasing demands of today's information systems. Unlike most vendors, Sysload Software focuses entirely on performance management and has gained an enviable reputation as the "Best of Breed" solution with over 500 customers, including Airbus, Aviva, Boeing, BNP Paribas, CGEY, Charles Schwab, Fujitsu-Siemens, Michelin, Renault and Sony.

Sysload allows you to take effective control of your IT infrastructure by providing real-time monitoring and expert diagnostics to drill-down to the root-cause of performance problems quickly and efficiently; analysing historical performance information to aid future planning of service and performance levels; and by providing enterprise-level reporting of your IT resource usage.

Systar

Systar is the leading provider of Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) solutions for Business and IT Managers. Systar solutions enable companies to achieve operational excellence through business process compliance monitoring, risk control and cost reduction. With 180 clients across the globe, including 8 of the world's 10 leading banks, Systar is the only pure-play BAM technology investment available on the public market.

Systar's BusinessBridge monitors, the performance of business processes and business services in real-time and historically against a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that typically represent the business commitments and customer expectations. The BusinessBridge portfolio includes solutions: WideVision Alert, ServiceVision and BusinessVision.

OmniVision is a unique distributed Resource Management solution designed for managers of large server farms. The solution allows users to make cost savings whilst improving service quality and providing an immediate and global view of servers and applications activity and their actual usage.

TeamQuest

TeamQuest specialises in Capacity Planning and IT Performance Optimisation. We bring you the knowledge and experience to fully utilise your existing IT infrastructure, consolidate your servers and manage system performance. Our software solutions and professional services help you meet today.s demands for minimising IT costs, meeting service levels and reducing data center complexity. Capacity Planning and Performance Management are essential tools in the ongoing process of managing your data center. This process is key to keep your IT infrastructure aligned with your business objectives today, and to meet tomorrow.s business demands with confidence.

VMWare

XSLS

XSLS specialise in providing market leading business performance and capacity planning solutions and services.  By providing end-user transaction response times, server, database, network, SAN and application metrics in real-time, we can provide you with an overview of your business and help you manage SLAs all within an ITIL framework.

Our products have been established for more than 15 years, and we have expert consultants who can help deliver the best results for your company.

 

XuiS

XuiS was founded in 1993 with a focus of delivering comprehensive enterprise management and monitoring solutions. Over the following years XuiS firmly established itself as major player in the systems management space with a sizable footprint in the financial services and retail sectors. Our solutions provide a single point of control for the multiplatform environment therefore reducing the amount of time spent on manually monitoring and managing the increasingly complex enterprise.

WatchTower is the cutting-edge “agentless” system, application and network monitoring solution. Its web-based interface gives users a “single-pane-of-glass” view of the entire enterprise. With WatchTower, you can monitor practically any application, operating system or network device therefore strengthening your risk management strategy and achieving your SLA goals.

iTrinegy

iTrinegy develops products that enable you to address the whole Networked Application Performance Lifecycle™ from initial design & development, through testing, QA, to production rollout and ongoing performance monitoring.

Our network emulation technology helps developers to understand how applications being developed on the desktop will perform when deployed across the organisation’s network or the internet, and then optimise the application before deployment.

This same technology is also ideal for Testers and QA Specialists to conduct realistic pre-deployment testing and reduce the opportunity for implementation failure.

Once deployed in the production network, our application performance monitoring technology rapidly helps network managers and support teams identify what is affecting application performance.