Altaworks Commander 3.0 Expands Application Quality Management Solution Set.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

NASHUA, N.H.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 22, 2004

Major diversified financial services company implements Commander to monitor service levels across over 30 applications to prevent negative business impact

Altaworks Corporation, a leading developer of distributed application performance management software, today announced the launch of Altaworks Commander 3.0, an important part of the company's family of Application Quality Management (AQM) solutions. Altaworks Commander provides enterprise IT organizations with an early-warning system for application "health" to ensure companies deliver the highest quality services to their customers and end users.

AQM solutions are designed to help companies simplify the measurement, isolation and resolution of performance problems in applications. It focuses on two critical phases of the application life cycle - systems test and production. As part of a comprehensive AQM solution, Altaworks Commander provides for early warning of unacceptable service levels, degradation of application health, and a vehicle for rapid troubleshooting of enterprise applications running in production, in order to reduce the frequency and duration of critical availability and performance problems.

Altaworks Commander 3.0 presents a simple user interface to a sophisticated service object model for organizing various application availability and response time tests. Starting with high-level application health measurements, IT operations staff can quickly drill down and find the results of the underlying tests to isolate the problem to a specific tier and server. IT and development organizations can conduct further analysis and root cause identification on application performance issues with the Altaworks Panorama product. Commander proactively tests infrastructure and application health and relates these to end-user experience through the service model. The service object model can be based on a variety of end-user, tier and component tests, and enables rapid drill-down to isolate availability or response time problems to the offending element in the infrastructure.

"Ensuring application quality requires tools that apply at every level of the infrastructure and applications stack, as well as at every stage of the application life cycle," said Johna Till Johnson, president and Chief Research Officer of Nemertes Research. "Our research shows that over 80% of enterprises have at least some non-network-optimized applications running across their networks. Many large firms are running hundreds to thousands of operations in production--and they need tools that allow them to monitor critical applications in production and isolate the problem to a specific tier and server."

Altaworks Commander is in use at nearly twenty diverse, large enterprises including a defense contractor, a cable TV entertainment company, and a brokerage firm. A Fortune 1000 diversified financial and business services company uses Altaworks Commander as the foundation of its application performance management infrastructure. The company operates over 30 Web applications including multiple e-commerce sites for individual consumers, large enterprises, and small businesses to order its products and services, as well as several intranet sites. Used across all these e-commerce and other business-critical applications, Commander automatically alerts the IT operations group of slowdowns or outages, ensuring real-time awareness of and responses to problems before they have an impact on their larger user base. Commander also allows IT to manage its outside service providers by providing a common, consolidated interface to identify and resolve problems specific to managed infrastructure and application development. In the future, Commander positions the company's IT organization to collaborate with its lines of businesses to establish and meet service level objectives required by both individual and enterprise customers.

"Given our experience working with enterprises concerning AQM, we know that IT operations has multiple, complex, business-critical applications to support, and the number and importance of those applications is growing more rapidly than the budget for the staff to monitor and support them," said Dave Danielson, CEO of Altaworks. "Because of Commander's hierarchical service object model, IT operations staffs can be monitoring business-critical applications within a few hours of initial installation and configuration, and stay ahead of the inevitable issues that negatively impact the quality of the user and customer experience."

Pricing for Altaworks Commander 3.0 begins at $35,000 for enterprise installations and includes the Controller, one Test Engine with support for up to 100 tests, four days of Deployment Services, and first year support and maintenance.

About Altaworks Corporation

Altaworks, a leader in application performance management, provides solutions to solve business application and service performance problems. Altaworks Panorama uses patented measurement, data collection, reduction, and analysis both inside and outside the application infrastructure to measure, isolate and resolve application performance problems, resulting in improved end-user experience and significantly reduced troubleshooting and downtime costs. Founded in late 1999, Altaworks is backed by first-tier financial partners St. Paul Venture Capital, Prism Venture Partners and YankeeTek Ventures.

Note: Altaworks, Altaworks Panorama, Altaworks Commander and Altaworks Commander Solutions are trademarks of Altaworks Corporation. The names of companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.