BladeLogic Rolls out the Industry's Most Advanced Data Center Automation Platform with the Availability of Release 7; Next-Generation Architecture Offers Breakthrough Capabilities in Operational Efficiency, Service Quality & Compliance Assurance.

LEXINGTON, Mass. -- BladeLogic, Inc., the world's leading provider of data center automation software, today announced the availability of BladeLogic Release 7, the industry's most advanced suite of data center automation software solutions. BladeLogic Release 7 is the first and only data center automation platform that enables multiple IT departments to cohesively manage, control and enforce changes to applications and their underlying infrastructure. This capability is delivered through a next-generation architecture called Synchronous Management(TM).

IT organizations have enabled a new generation of enterprise applications based on today's distributed computing architecture in which substantial components of the application and related services are provisioned on servers located in one or multiple data centers. Because of the sheer number and complexity of these diverse software components, a number of different IT groups with very specialized skills - such as systems administrators, application developers, database administrators, security engineers, application support specialists and a variety of other operational staff - have to be able to easily work together to effectively manage and support these applications.

However, the fundamental problem with today's data center automation tools is that they focus only on automating a set of management tasks performed by a particular group in isolation, and do not take into consideration inter-related management activities performed by different groups that affect the infrastructure and applications being managed. As a result, an inordinate amount of time, effort and money is spent reconciling actions performed by one group with the actions of another. The inherent conflict created by this piecemeal approach results in diminished service quality, high compliance and security risks, and higher operating costs.

With Release 7, BladeLogic's Synchronous Management architecture offers a new management paradigm by allowing organizations to synchronize all configuration management activities across disparate IT teams performing different management actions. By enabling the use of dynamic, multi-functional policies that link specific people and teams to explicit infrastructure components and the precise management actions they are authorized to perform, BladeLogic ensures provisioning, configuration management and compliance management actions are not made in isolation, but in context of the overall needs of the business. The end result is dramatically improved IT service quality, reduced operational costs, better compliance to policies and greater flexibility to respond to an ever-increasing rate of change in the data center.

"After reviewing and testing the major configuration management solutions, we selected BladeLogic Release 7 due to its full range of server and application management functionality and its ability to be easily adopted into our environment," said Chris McDaniel, Director of IT Operations, Rearden Commerce. "Since deploying BladeLogic Release 7, we now have consistent server and application builds and clear visibility to what has been installed on each server, helping Rearden Commerce to improve our operational processes and maintain compliance with corporate, security and regulatory polices."

In Release 7, BladeLogic introduces many new improvements to BladeLogic Operations Manager(TM), the company's flagship product, and introduces BladeLogic Application Release Manager(TM), a dedicated application release management solution. BladeLogic Application Release Manager streamlines the application packaging and promotion process across development, test and production environments to ensure timely and accurate application releases. The result is expedited delivery of new business applications, less production issues with updates to existing business applications and higher availability for all mission critical business applications.

Key Highlights of BladeLogic Release 7

BladeLogic Synchronous Management Architecture

Unified Policy for Synchronous Management

--Dynamic, multi-functional policies that synchronize all provisioning, configuration and compliance management activities across different teams, applications and related infrastructure

BladeLogic Application Release Manager

Application Release Management

--Standalone application release management solution to streamline application packaging and promotion for complex J2EE and .Net applications

--Hierarchical application environment models to support run-time parameterization of environment-specific configurations

--Application promotion rules driven by access controls to ensure consistency in environments and release versions and eliminate errors associated with unauthorized package changes and promotions

BladeLogic Operations Manager

Compliance

--Sophisticated rules-based auditing for compliance to provide more accurate and granular audit results and improved visibility

--Holistic IT compliance audits that integrate security, build, operational and regulatory policies with automated remediation and exception handling

Access Control

--Configuration-level role-based access control to reduce security risks associated with granting too much privilege and improve visibility into administrator activity

--Built-in access control policies based on IT governance best practices such as Control Objectives for Information and Technology (COBIT) to enable IT organizations to fulfill regulatory and governance requirements

Best Practices Content

--Out-of-the-box security, build, configuration and process policies based on best practices such as Center for Internet Security (CIS), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), National Security Agency (NSA) and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

--CIS-certified security compliance policies

"Unlike other solutions in the market, BladeLogic started with a clean sheet of paper to develop software designed to specifically address today's enormous challenges in managing the server and application infrastructure in the data center," said Dev Ittycheria, president and CEO, BladeLogic. "With its Synchronous Management architecture, the breadth of sophisticated features and proven success in the field, BladeLogic Release 7 is the most advanced data center automation platform in the industry today."

For more information, please contact BladeLogic at 781-257-3500 or [e-mail].

About BladeLogic

BladeLogic is the world's leading provider of next-generation data center automation software with the largest installed base of Global 2000 and other leading customers, including such organizations as Capgemini, E*Trade, Expedia, HSBC, Lockheed Martin, priceline.com, Time Warner, VeriSign, Virgin Mobile and Walmart.com. BladeLogic's award-winning suite of enterprise-class data center automation solutions enables organizations of any size to achieve continuous configuration compliance across large-scale, distributed server and application environments, resulting in dramatically reduced data center operating costs, improved service quality, increased efficiencies, and enhanced compliance and security. BladeLogic is a privately held company headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts, USA. For more information, please visit www.bladelogic.com.