Borland Software Corporation today announced the launch of Deployment Op-Center, a new cross-platform infrastructure software management solution, introduced to help businesses to control costs, manage change, and increase reliability in their IT operations. Deployment Op-Center is designed to reduce the complexity and high operational overhead associated with controlling the availability and continued ‘health’ of software infrastructure, applications, and services in today’s highly distributed and heterogeneous IT environments. By automating the complex manual processes of deployment, configuration and control, Deployment Op-Center significantly increases the productivity of IT staff. The solution is designed to address collaboration issues between software development and deployment teams that can lead to software failures and revenue loss. Deployment Op-Center also extends the Borland Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) strategy to the operational lifecycle of applications in production environments.
“Success in the production environment is the true measure of software success. Once an application is defined, designed, developed, and tested, it still must be rolled out on time, within budget, and in line with end user expectations,” said Boz Elloy, senior vice president of software products at Borland. “Deployment Op-Center creates visibility into and manageability of the heterogeneous deployment topology that all enterprises have, today. It helps applications not only stay up and running cost-effectively, but also helps manage any changes quickly and predicatably to reduce downtime and maximize ROI.”
While Deployment Op-Center addresses critical management functionality for cutting-edge platforms such as J2EE and Microsoft® .NET, CORBA® management is a high priority requirement addressed by Deployment Op-Center. “As a leader in the CORBA market, with a strong installed base of Borland® VisiBroker® customers, we are addressing a critical need to manage existing mission-critical CORBA applications in production, specifically within the telecommunications and finance verticals,” added Thanh Tran, vice president and general manager of the deployment solutions group at Borland. “Deployment Op-Center is already gaining interest in these Borland customer organizations.”
Market Need for Infrastructure Software Management
Infrastructure software management addresses the need to control IT operation costs and risks posed by application downtime. Analyst firm META Research Group addresses the need for infrastructure software management within the category of Intelligent Configuration Management (ICM), which they estimate will become a major component of most Global 2000 infrastructure and application management environments by 2007.
META estimates that the challenges associated with infrastructure software management are heightened by the continued transition toward grid computing environments and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), as organizations strengthen their ability to cost effectively remain agile to business changes1.
“Applications today are becoming increasingly complex and distributed. This augments the challenge of isolating and fixing failures to protect application availability and dramatically increases the complexity of deploying and managing applications,” commented Thomas Murphy, senior program director at META Group. “Traditionally, solving this problem has required specialized and expensive skills with complicated manual processes. In addition, there is a growing need to enable improved communications between the development and operations staff, extending ALM from a development viewpoint to encompass deployment and management.”
Bridging the Gap Between Development and Deployment Teams
Taking a holistic approach to infrastructure applications management, the Borland vision is to offer a formalized mechanism for the transfer of deployment-related information from development to deployment teams. Developers are able to document core application deployment requirements for distribution and configuration. Deployment Op-Center provides an XML based, template-driven user interface to assist the collaboration between development and deployment teams.
Deployment Op-Center offers IT managers centralized automation and control over an organization’s infrastructure applications utilizing the following key features:
*IT Inventory management: the definition, modeling, and mapping of models to define logical and physical associations between applications and infrastructure resources;
*Application infrastructure configuration management: middleware (J2EE, .NET, and CORBA), messaging (TIBCO™, SonicMQ®), Web servers, and database servers;
*Automatic failure detection, isolation, and recovery;
*Configuration templates that provide developers with a mechanism to document critical deployment information;
*SNMP based connectivity with network and system management products (such as HP OpenView and IBM® Tivoli).
Borland Deployment Solutions
Deployment Op-Center is part of a family of deployment solutions available from Borland today. This includes Borland Janeva® 62 and the newly enhanced Borland Enterprise Server 6;3 also announced today. Used together, these products provide a tightly integrated single solution designed to address the challenges inherent in deploying, integrating, and managing applications distributed in multiple geographic locations. Deployment Op-Center is available on Windows®, Solaris, and Linux platforms. For additional information, please visit www.borland.com.
