Coface Brings Software Development Under Control with dynaTrace Diagnostics(R).

dynaTrace Diagnostics Quickly Reveals Performance Problems in 24x7 Production Operation

MAINZ, Germany & LINZ, Austria -- Application performance problems discovered during load testing can be a real headache. The testing group sees the problem but typically cannot isolate the cause. Does the launch have to be postponed? Can the development team pinpoint the errors and resolve them in time to remain on schedule? At Coface, one of Germany's largest providers of receivables management services, roughly 60 percent of the applications in use are developed in-house. As a result the situation explained above was all too common. After evaluating a number of tools to help rapidly locate and resolve application performance issues under load, Coface chose dynaTrace Diagnostics (http://www.dynatrace.com/en/Products2.aspx). The software was installed initially for the development and testing teams, who found that the simple, straightforward integration of dynaTrace Diagnostics into their existing load-test tools and workflow provided immediate benefits.

Coface is known throughout Europe primarily as a loan insurer. The company, however, offers a broad range of additional services through its subsidiary companies including company ratings, financing and debt collection. Each individual German business unit of Coface operates as an independent company under the umbrella of Coface Holding AG, and as such each demands very specific requirements from IT. This results in a significant percentage of custom applications being developed in-house. Cofanet, for example, is a large scale web application which provides Coface customers with rapid, secure on-line loan application and qualification. It is critical that Cofanet provide 24x7 availability and consistently high performance for each individual customer transaction in order to maintain an acceptable service level. Anything less hinders customer satisfaction and ultimately impacts the bottom line.

In order to recognize post-deployment problems early in software applications, Coface has also implemented dynaTrace Diagnostics in production. Marc-Oliver Ihm, Manager of J2EE administration, reported the following after one month of using dynaTrace Diagnostics: "For me it is important that I can interact with dynaTrace Diagnostics very intuitively. Comparable tools which we evaluated in our proof of concept may have been appropriate for people who only do Java development all day, but I also have many other responsibilities. In addition to its ease of use, dynaTrace Diagnostics also delivers against all of our other requirements. For example, measurement and recording parameters can be altered dynamically and non-intrusively during runtime. As a result you can follow the behavior of individual user transactions very well. The deployment into 24x7 production operation causes no noteworthy additional impact on the system and dynaTrace Diagnostics' PurePaths enable us to track problems to their root-cause in a matter of minutes - for that other products we evaluated often required half a day."

At the core of dynaTrace Diagnostics is its innovative PurePath[R] Technology. PurePaths enable the tracking of transactions over multiple logical and/or physical layers and provide simultaneous performance measurements of each server, component and method boundary (where does the cause of the problem lie?), enriched with detailed context information (why are these problems occurring?). Another major innovation in dynaTrace Diagnostics version 2.0 (available since March 2007) comes in the form of Business Transaction Mapping. Built on dynaTrace's PurePath Technology, it cleanly translates technical performance metrics and exceptions into user transaction types and business-centric application workflows. This abstraction allows what had previously been purely technical performance data to be visualized, interpreted and acted upon in terms that are more relevant to the business user. This empowers IT to communicate more effectively with their business end-users, and deliver consistently higher quality service to internal and external customers. For the first time, dynaTrace Diagnostics 2.0 enables the rapid, detailed performance diagnosis of heterogeneous production applications built on Java and .NET - including those applications which combine both technologies. This becomes critical as trends such as SOA, web services and EAI drive more and more distributed applications toward this type of heterogeneity.

About dynaTrace software GmbH

dynaTrace software is the leading provider of application performance diagnostic solutions for business-critical Java and .NET distributed applications. dynaTrace's innovative PurePath[R] technology is the only solution that can trace a unique transaction path across multiple physical tiers and servers - in applications under load - enabling customers to move beyond basic monitoring to providing rapid corrective action. In each stage of an application's lifecycle from development to QA to staging, and through production operations, IT personnel need to observe and understand where and why performance bottlenecks exist. With dynaTrace Diagnostics[R], IT personnel gain a better understanding of the dynamic behavior of their applications, allowing them to quickly reconstruct problematic transactions, identify the in-context root cause of the problem and fix it quickly and effectively. http://www.dynatrace.com

About Coface Germany (Coface Holding AG)

Coface Germany, in Mainz, is one of the largest and best known providers of services in the management of receivables, with a history of over 80 years. Coface Germany belongs to one of the world's largest loan insurers, Coface, Paris. Loan insurance protects companies from defaults on receivables both domestically and abroad. This area of business is run by Coface Kredit. Three further businesses offer services in the management of receivables: Coface Finance (Factoring), Coface receivables (collection of receivables/debts) and Coface Rating (creditworthiness/@rating). The company maintains information on roughly 45 million companies around the world, allowing business partners of customers from all industries and in over 150 countries to be checked for creditworthiness. The companies of Coface Germany reported total revenues in 2006 of around 332 Million Euro, with loan insurance and factoring risks of roughly 110 Billion Euro accepted. Coface Germany employees roughly 850 people. http://www.coface.de

HEADQUARTER USA: DYNATRACE SOFTWARE INC., 200 WEST STREET, WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS 02541, USA, T [phone], F [phone], E [e-mail]

HEADQUARTER EMEA: DYNATRACE SOFTWARE GMBH, FREISTADTER STR. 313, 4040 LINZ, AUSTRIA, T [phone], F [phone], E [e-mail]

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