2-page Partner Case Study - Posted 6/22/2007

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Tidal Software

Enterprises Link Heterogeneous Applications to Identify Performance Problems Faster

Enterprise IT staffs often devote much valuable time to tedious performance management tasks. Using Tidal Software products, companies can automate performance management for SAP, PeopleSoft, and other mission-critical applications running on Windows®, Linux, and UNIX operating systems. They can integrate performance data through a single Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007–based interface, freeing IT talent for strategic work.

Business Needs

Large enterprises today have evolved complex IT infrastructures that include software from SAP, Oracle, Informatica, Veritas, IBM, PeopleSoft, and other enterprise applications, running on Windows®, UNIX, and Linux operating systems. Expensive application experts spend a significant amount of time and energy on routine tasks, such as batch process management and performance monitoring, rather than on building new business processes and applying technology strategically.

In application performance management, companies often use application-specific performance management tools that deliver data and alerts from multiple systems. Highly trained administrators then analyze the data and determine next steps. “Application administrators are not only expensive, but they operate at people speed versus machine speed,” says Thomas Hooker, Vice President of Product and Field Marketing for Tidal Software. “Also, they may not know that something is wrong until it fails.” Tidal Software, of Palo Alto, California, makes performance management solutions for heterogeneous application environments.

Costly IT resources are often so focused on keeping enterprise applications running and solving low-level performance degradation problems that they don’t have time to think strategically about how the organization can better use its SAP, PeopleSoft, or Oracle applications to solve business problems.

“Enterprise organizations want to keep these mission-critical business applications running at peak performance. But they also want to make better use of their IT talent,” Hooker says. “They’re looking for solutions that both aggregate and analyze data from multiple systems, so that expensive application administrators can spend less time on problems and more time on strategic issues.”

Solution

Tidal Software uses Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007 to integrate, correlate, and analyze performance data from multiple, heterogeneous applications running on diverse operating systems, and route it into a single management console. Using the Tidal Horizon performance management solution, companies can automate best practices for detecting, identifying, and analyzing availability and performance problems, and access the results through the familiar Operations Manager 2007 interface.

Our product routes the data from multiple applications into Operations Manager 2007, analyzes it, and identifies performance slowdowns across an entire IT environment. Thomas Hooker Vice President of Product and Field Marketing, Tidal Software

For example, a large petrochemical company with a global enterprise resource planning (ERP) system used Tidal Horizon to determine the root cause of nagging performance degradation of processes that spanned multiple systems. The company was able to speed up its processes and reduce downtime.

Tidal Software is a member of the Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA), a community of software and hardware vendors that work together to enhance the interoperability of their products with Microsoft systems. IVA facilitates collaboration among vendors, provides labs for testing and validating solutions, and publishes results for customers. “IVA puts us in touch with other interoperability vendors and shows our customers how they can take advantage of their existing business applications and performance management software to solve business problems,” Hooker says.

Benefits

Companies use Tidal Software solutions to lower IT costs, free IT staff to focus on strategic issues, and improve the performance of enterprise applications running on diverse systems.

• Savings from IT efficiencies. The petrochemical company mentioned earlier was able to reduce a two-hours-a-day manual ERP monitoring process to a 30-second automated process. “Using our products, a typical ERP, PeopleSoft, or SAP administrator can expect to save around 1,440 hours per year, which is a savings of [U.S.]$115,000,” Hooker says. “That’s money that can be invested in something other than application management.” On average, Tidal Horizon reduces ERP alert volumes by more than 90 percent, so that companies can identify root-cause issues and focus on creating incremental business value.
  
  
• More strategic use of IT staff. “Our customers want to give their IT staffs more time to focus on overall business processes rather than on the performance of constituent applications. Using our products, they are able to free up key IT staff members’ time to focus on the strategic use of applications such as SAP and PeopleSoft to further the business,” Hooker says.
  
  One consumer packaged goods manufacturer used Tidal Horizon to create a common framework to identify performance management problems across its ERP environment and link them back to Tidal Enterprise Scheduler to run its manufacturing jobs. The company was able to eliminate the data silos between its ERP system and automation engine and proactively alert the IT staff to looming performance problems that would slow manufacturing processes.
  
  
• Improved application performance. “Companies are able to reverse debilitating performance degradation, which is the number-one performance-related problem for large enterprises,” Hooker says. Using Tidal Horizon, organizations can quickly determine the causes of performance problems that involve multiple interconnected applications, eliminate performance slowdowns, and even anticipate and avoid future slowdowns.