Active Reasoning Partners with IBM to Provide Real-time IT Service Management.

Closed-loop Change and Configuration Auditing Capabilities Eliminate Configuration Drift

SAN MATEO, Calif. -- Active Reasoning, the leader in real-time configuration auditing, today announced a strategic technology partnership with IBM (NYSE: IBM). As part of this partnership, Active Reasoning System 5 has been certified as "Ready For Tivoli" and integrated with the IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB) to provide users with continuous change and event detection for the identification of configuration drift.

"Change and configuration management is an area of high growth in 2007, up 28% from 2006," writes Thomas Mendel, Forrester Research. "This is a direct consequence of innovation and process improvement via tools such as process automation"1.

Large IT organizations operate complex, heterogeneous IT infrastructures that change on a continuous basis. As a result, the ability to manage change is critical to improve operational efficiency, meet service level agreements and reduce compliance-related costs. By adding real-time capability to the IBM Tivoli CCMDB, Active Reasoning allows companies to plan and assess the impact of change across their IT infrastructure and do so with the most up-to-date IT configuration information possible.

As a result of Active Reasoning's partnership with IBM, companies that have already implemented change and configuration management databases can now increase their value. By using a real-time CCMDB repository to map changes back to configuration standards, security posture and forensic capabilities of IT organizations are greatly enhanced, reducing the risks associated with downtime and compliance audits.

"Infrastructure complexity has grown beyond the scope of manual change and configuration management," said William R. Winters, Chairman and CEO of Active Reasoning. "Because change is continuous, snapshotting for configuration drift must be augmented with continuous drift monitoring. Not all change activity between snapshots is harmful, but without real-time transparency, businesses are taking a big risk and are left playing catch-up to audit what happened, when it happened, and who did it. We enable companies to diagnose policy and control violations and configuration drift, as they happen."

Key features of the Active Reasoning solution include:

* Policy Mapping Database[TM] (PMDB), a tool for linking IT policies and controls to rules that program the Active Reasoning event collection agents

* Continuous monitoring of user-driven changes and a wide array of infrastructure components and configuration items (CIs)

* Integration with change management and ticketing systems for reconciling changes to tickets and CIs

* Dashboards giving IT management a view of compliance health and detailed reports that provide a forensic trail to diagnose system failures and/or policy violations

The Active Reasoning IBM Tivoli solution is available immediately.

About Active Reasoning

Active Reasoning is a leading provider of IT Governance Automation solutions. Active Reasoning System 5 is an IT Controls Automation platform that maps policy frameworks like ITIL and regulations like SOX to changes and events in the IT infrastructure. Active Reasoning provides Real-time Configuration Auditing by continuously detecting, validating, and reporting unauthorized changes to systems, applications and databases. Active Reasoning helps Fortune 500 customers mitigate operational risks, increase system uptime, meet compliance objectives and reduce the time and cost of audits. See a brief demo at http://www.activereasoning.com/solutions/demo.html

1 "The IT Management Software Market," Forrester Research, Inc., March 9, 2007