PLATFORM POWERS ENTERPRISE GRID PRODUCTIVITY WITH NEW PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS.

Platform Computing has announced the availability of two new Performance Management solutions, Platform Analyzer and Platform Explorer, designed to improve the ROI and productivity of distributed and Grid computing architectures. These solutions give senior management increased visibility to the link between effective IT management and improved product development, making IT a business driver and not just a cost center. Performance Management is an essential element of distributed computing, enabling an organization to manage, provision and budget for IT assets, resulting in improved productivity and reduced overall cost.

"We developed Platform Analyzer and Explorer in close consultation with our customers, who wanted more visibility into the use of their distributed IT resources to make more accurate decisions, based on strategic business objectives," said Paul Hill, vice president, marketing, Platform. "With our Performance Management solutions, we can identify fundamentally under-performing IT assets and help organizations improve productivity, which can result in faster time to market and higher quality products and services."

Platform Analyzer and Platform Explorer are the first performance management solutions designed specifically to enable IT decision making for distributed computing environments. With these solutions, organizations can make more strategic IT decisions through valuable insight into system, application and workload performance across the enterprise. These solutions integrate Platform's workload, resource and performance management capabilities to provide a scalable, seamless solution to harness and leverage the full power of distributed computing investments.

"Platform's performance management solutions helped us improve productivity by giving us more visibility to the performance of our IT farm," said Mark Trusheim, co-president and COO, Cereon Genomics (a Monsanto subsidiary). "With this information, we were able to make changes which increase collaboration and reduce time to discovery for genes to improve crops."

Platform Analyzer -- is a web-based operational reporting tool for system performance. Platform Analyzer reports on workload throughput and software and hardware utilization, and transparently gathers, tracks and logs valuable system information from more than 100 indices, such as processing power, memory use, and license utilization, in one easy-to-use, scalable database. Originally developed as part of Platform LSF, Analyzer is an integrated part of Platform's Performance Management solutions.

Platform also announced the Analyzer QuickStart package, a turn-key professional services offering to speed deployment or upgrades, including on-site installation and configuration and more than 20 custom reports not available in the base Analyzer offering.

Platform Explorer -- provides insight into performance, cost and utilization of IT assets to give IT decision makers, planners and senior management access to in-depth performance data. An OLAP-based analytics product, Platform Explorer leverages the data collection capabilities of Platform Analyzer and focuses on three main analytical areas: productivity; cost and system usage to help enterprises improve workload throughput, reduce operating and project costs, provision resources accurately, and increase productivity and resource utilization.

Both products support Oracle 8/8i plug-in for advanced database management and administration. Applications run on all major UNIX platforms, including Compaq Alpha, Digital UNIX /Compaq Tru64 UNIX, HP-UX, IBM AIX, Linux on X86, SGI IRIX, and Sun Solaris, and on Microsoft Windows NT, and Microsoft Windows 2000 workstations.

According to industry research, the average number of unused computing cycles in a company is about 47%, which includes heavily used servers and hosts. When desktops alone are considered, the percentage is much higher.(1) However, many organizations do not have enough visibility to how these measurements relate to return on investment of IT assets and impact profitability. In an October 2001 survey of 209 senior executives at large U.S. companies, Forrester Research Inc. found that 32% had reduced IT spending since the beginning of the year. Other recent studies indicate that IT budgets are expected to shrink or remain flat next year, while in many cases the workload has remained static, which underscores the importance of 'doing more with less' and optimizing usage of existing resources.