By VSM News Staff

published: Monday, April 28 2008

 New Module Delivers Advanced Usability and Decision Support, Tackles Growing Virtualization Challenges.

April 28, 2008, NEW YORK and LONDON - Tideway, the fastest growing provider of IT automation software, today announced the availability of Tideway FoundationT 7.1. The latest version of Tideway's award-winning application dependency mapping (ADM) solution allows users to clearly identify what has changed in their IT environment and why, view authorized, approved and expected changes, and carve out the most relevant slices of data for more individualized and powerful reporting. These usability enhancements are designed to meet the needs of a broader user base within an organization and provide advanced decision support tailored to distinct user requirements. 

Developed in collaboration with Tideway's customer advisory board, Foundation 7.1's new change control capabilities enable users to define a baseline "approved" state for their environment and compare all observed changes to the approved and expected states of that environment. This sophisticated change intelligence goes beyond merely providing data and offers users suggestions about what action should be taken to reconcile and explain discrepancies between the approved environment and the "as is" state captured by Foundation. Users can delve deeper into Foundation data to troubleshoot and determine the authorization status of specific lifecycle changes.

 The user-centric portal provides individual users a unique view of the environment that captures the high-level configuration items (CIs) and relationships most important to them, establishing reports that align with each     user's distinct job function, such as application owners, server managers, virtualization specialists and storage specialists.  These views enable users to define and narrow their focus based on physical location, technology class or business application. Users can define multiple views as needed, and views can be shared between various individuals to form the basis for collaboration and communication around a particular issue or initiative. 

Foundation 7.1 also offers enhanced capabilities for managing virtual environments and controlling virtual machine (VM) sprawl. The cross-platform and vendor-agnostic solution allows users to monitor the appearance, disappearance and migration of virtual hosts and reconcile those changes directly with their authorization status to help eliminate unnecessary outages and excessive license charges. Foundation 7.1's enhanced usability features allow users to tag configuration items with comments, notes and links to other items, increasing communication and collaboration between specialized teams. Superior visualization capabilities now enable users to navigate the graphical maps that Foundation produces to represent relationships between configuration items by simply dragging their mouse. 

"Tideway helps our customers better analyze and detect changes and collaboratively troubleshoot to make their data more relevant and actionable," said Richard Muirhead, Founder and CEO of Tideway. "Tideway has always provided the most expedient way to answer the question, 'What has changed in my environment?' Foundation 7.1 now has the ability to answer the question, 'What are the changes I really need to know about?' to make our users more effective and allow them to get the job done."

About Tideway

Tideway provides a shared platform for technologists to visualize and report on the data they need to make informed decisions. Tideway FoundationT software continuously maps application relationships to physical and virtual infrastructure, including the dependencies between them. This single, automated view of application topology enables enterprises to cut costs, reduce risk and better manage change.  Tideway is rated as a category leader by prominent analyst firms. Clients include Dresdner Kleinwort, ING, Linklaters and Mizuho Bank. For more information, visit www.tideway.com.