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COLLATION LAUNCHES CONFIGNIA 2.0

Collation Inc, a pioneer of top-down application management solutions for the enterprise, launched the third major release of its market-leading Confignia configuration management software for distributed data center applications. The new product release, Confignia 2.0, builds on Collation's patent pending agent-free auto-discovery engine, built-in Data Center Reference Model, and innovative user interface to provide IT Operations personnel with complete top-down understanding of applications and their infrastructures.

"The demand for this product is clear; in a recent survey of IT directors and managers at 35 large enterprises, 90 percent said understanding the run-time infrastructures and the dependencies of component-based applications was critical," said Robert Roblin, CEO of Collation. "Providing this level of visibility is central to our vision. As a result, Confignia provides a top-down view of the availability, dependencies and cross-tier configurations of applications. Without this automated view, IT staff can't meet the service-level needs of the business."


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The Collation Application Status Manager, an add-on module to Collation Confignia, integrates component level events from products such as IBM Tivoli and Micromuse NetCool. It then uses the dependencies and application topologies provided by Confignia to determine the application impact of these component level events. This allows IT operations staff to know about application availability problems much sooner, and prioritize the fixing of component problems based on the application impact. This top-down approach takes the guess work out of understanding and assessing which components problems have actual business impact.

Confignia 2.0 ensures application availability by rapidly and dynamically mapping all run-time application components, attributes, interdependencies and change history and by providing accurate run-time application views of the IT infrastructure. By enabling customers to see the structure, context and status of business applications, IT operational staff can better understand, prioritize, solve and prevent problems. Confignia 2.0 continues to provide the most rapid time to value of any product in its class. Customers deploying Confignia can begin using it to manage applications the day of implementation.

In addition to the Collation Application Status Manager, Confignia 2.0 adds the following new capabilities:

  • The most comprehensive and extensible agent-free data center discovery available. This includes the ability to rapidly develop new Discovery Sensors on demand via the Collation Sensor Factory, a flexible resource to meet the specific needs of customer's datacenters.
  • Data, process and event APIs to enable greater levels of automation through integration with other management products.
  • An improved set of analytics for troubleshooting and change planning, including application and datacenter drift reports.

"With the growing complexity of applications in the infrastructure, and the increased difficulty of managing them, automating configuration management is more critical than ever," said Mary Johnston Turner, vice president of Summit Strategies. "With each product release, Collation has continually delivered on the next level of customer need, and Confignia 2.0 is no exception."

The release of Confignia 2.0 caps a busy six months for Collation. Since releasing Confignia 1.5 in September of 2003, Collation has added customers in financial services, media and other industries, announced partnerships with leading technology companies including Micromuse, and launched new solutions including e-ITIL and datacenter consolidation.

"It's more critical than ever to stay on top of managing n-tier applications today, as the number of components and interdependencies between servers, software and applications has skyrocketed," said Kim Ross, CIO of Nielsen Media Research. "Confignia cuts right to the heart of this need and as a result will help us manage our applications to deliver the service level that our clients not only need, but demand."

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