These are my links for October 1st through October 5th:

• Zyrion Updates Traverse for Better View of IT Infrastructure – The company is launching Version 5.0 of its Traverse BSM (business service management) software, which includes the Network Flow Analysis feature to help IT administrators ensure the optimal performance of their IT infrastructure and various business services.

  “With the new functionality in Traverse, Zyrion is addressing the need to cleanly and seamlessly connect business services monitoring with low-level packet analysis,” Vikas Aggarwal, founder and CEO of Zyrion, said in a statement. “Traverse continues to bridge the information gap by providing enterprises the ability to more efficiently and effectively determine the sources of infrastructure performance degradation that are affecting business-critical services.”

• Correlsense Announces Free Subscription Licenses of SharePath RUM – “Real User Measurements (RUM) tools are merely a partial gateway to ensure better and more consistent business outcomes. As such they are a commodity like email and should be priced accordingly. Why spend upwards of 150K on a ‘stop watch’ when what IT really needs is to solve the whole problem,” said Lanir Shacham, Correlsense CTO.

  Continued Shacham, “In order to truly impact customer retention, ensure more positive online brand experiences, and improve user satisfaction, companies must be able to determine not only ‘how long’ a transaction takes, but address the core issues …

  “We believe it’s time to stop throwing tools at parts of the problem and address the difficult task of dynamically detecting and monitoring the entire path of each transaction. The reason we are giving away SharePath RUM is our belief that when IT organizations see what it can do and how the rest of our SharePath product fills out the full transaction picture, they will want the full solution,” said Shacham.

• BankServ Launches SWIFT for Corporates Solution for BMC Software to Cut Costs and Improve Treasury Operations – SWIFT Corporate Solution for BMC Software, a leading global provider of business service management solutions, located in Houston, Texas. The new SWIFT implementation will make international financial transactions less expensive, while improving both payment and treasury operations.
• What is Quality of Experience? – QoE, while not always numerically quantifiable, is the most significant single factor in a real-world evaluation of the user experience. It is in the best interest of any enterprise to maximize its user QoE. One might draw an analogy: While the quality of medical care can be evaluated in many ways, the most meaningful results are how how long the patients live (numerically quantifiable) and how well they feel (not quantifiable). Such factors, however broadly defined, have a profound effect on the long-term success of an enterprise.
• IBM developerWorks: Wikis – Tivoli Business Service Manager Wiki – Installing, Configuring, and Testing IBM Tivoli Network Manager IP Edition and Tivoli Business Service Manager Failover – This document includes procedures for installing and configuring a failover environment where IBM® Tivoli® Network Manager IP Edition (Network Manager) and Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) have a common object server (OMNIBus) and Tivoli Integrated Portal server.
• Independent Research Firm Says OpTier’s BTM Technology is ‘On Fire’ – A report issued today by independent firm, Forrester Research, Inc., says OpTier represents the next step in the evolution of next generation BSM tools. The research report titled, "Tech Horizons: OpTier, A Step Towards Business Service Management (BSM) 2.0," outlines the benefits of the company and its CoreFirst® product.

  Based on the analysis conducted by Forrester Research, OpTier was categorized as being "on fire" with a total heat factor of 93 percent out of a possible 100 percent.

  The Forrester report states, "the CoreFirst BTM concept is an answer to the end-to-end transaction management requirements that have been nagging IT operations for a long time." It goes on to note that while today's BSM and APM solutions have not been able to prioritize transactions that are business significant and pinpoint performance issues quickly and accurately, "the convergence of these disciplines into BTM embodied by CoreFirst seems to be the solution."

• Market for network-monitoring systems grows – Some of the test-equipment manufacturers in the passive-system space, such as Accanto Systems and RADCOM, have already shifted their focus from protocol analyzers to emerging markets like network-monitoring systems and CEM (customer experience management) systems. As network operators have expanded their networks, subscribers have been given a greater choice of providers, which in turn has increased competition in the market.

  To tackle this situation, network operators are spending more money on measuring the QoS (quality of service) and QoE (quality of experience) at the subscriber’s end. Because CEM systems can provide network operators with these parameters and reduce customer churn, demand for such systems increased significantly in 2008. Tektronix, the market share leader in this space, recently acquired Arantech, a Dublin-based provider of CEM systems, to address this trend.

• OpTier builds BSM 2.0 BTM platform – OpTier Experience Manager is the first expansion of its product line, and will sit alongside the company’s CoreFirst flagship as a tandem for what OpTier calls Business Transaction Management or BTM.

  This is something analysts have mooted as the future direction of a movement that started out with Business Service Management, popularised by the likes of BMC Software, HP and CA Inc.

  Forrester says that BTM is based on the ability to trace a transaction path through n-tiers of infrastructure components in order to provide visibility into the transaction and a basis to define whether a transaction’s behaviour is normal, or is signalling a performance or availability issue.

  It names OpTier and rival Correlsense as providing tools that give visibility into transaction paths and says CA is developing the same sort of capability for Wily.