Compuware Application Performance Management Solution Reduces Infrastructure Costs while Delivering Excellent Application Service

New Compuware Vantage Solution Ties Infrastructure Management to Service Management

DETROIT--April 26, 2004--Compuware Corporation (NASDAQ: CPWR) today announced a new version of Compuware Vantage, its award-winning application service management solution. Compuware Vantage 9.1 is the first comprehensive solution to tie infrastructure management to service management, helping to better align the use of IT resources with the requirements of the business.

Today’s IT organizations are seeking to reduce infrastructure costs. The insight and visibility provided by Vantage 9.1 allows these professionals to identify opportunities and make changes with greater confidence that the adjustments are beneficial from both a cost and service perspective. Vantage 9.1 allows organizations to manage bandwidth subscriptions, perform server consolidations and rehost applications without compromising application service.

"In many organizations, IT makes infrastructure changes without being able to accurately assess the impact on the business," said Dennis Drogseth, Vice President, Enterprise Management Associates. "For example, IT may change network configurations, relocate servers or reassign application workloads. In some cases, IT may be making what it considers a routine change, but may inadvertently place the business at risk. Vantage 9.1 will help IT to take a more service-oriented approach to managing infrastructure, so that IT professionals will have a clearer business context for change-related initiatives. This should help to enable IT to optimize infrastructure investments more effectively, while preventing unanticipated damage to business services."

Service-oriented approach to infrastructure management
It is no longer acceptable for an IT organization to manage infrastructure in isolation. Today, IT professionals must understand, manage and communicate the relationship between the infrastructure and the critical business services that it supports. This allows IT to work closely with its customers to assure that infrastructure resources are meeting the needs of the business.

Vantage 9.1 provides IT professionals with the insight to understand the business impact of infrastructure changes by monitoring applications from an end-user perspective, allowing successful application of cost management strategies such as:

WAN Right-Sizing: The growing complexity of critical business applications has increased bandwidth requirements, but how do organizations know when enough is enough? Vantage provides reports and analysis of bandwidth consumption by application (and user), which helps IT organizations understand how key business applications compete with low-priority applications, and how business use is impacted by personal use or viral activity on the network. With this information, IT and executive management can make more informed decisions about raising and lowering bandwidth subscription levels.
Server Consolidation: Mergers, acquisitions and the need for new business-critical applications can dramatically increase the number of -- and the traffic flowing through -- an organization’s servers. How do today’s cost-conscious organizations looking to minimize expenditures on server hardware and server administration know when and on which machines to reallocate application workloads? With Vantage, IT teams can leverage a detailed view of server traffic to highlight opportunities to reduce costs by eliminating underutilized servers and non-essential server access.
Linux Re-Hosting: To reduce costs, improve service or enhance security, some organizations are looking to migrate to Linux. As they transition, how can they be assured that application service levels will remain constant or improve? Vantage provides IT organizations with around-the-clock monitoring of performance from the client, network and server perspectives, delivering reports containing the essential baseline information for understanding and evaluating changes to application service levels after a migration.

Insight for informed decision-making
The first priority for any IT organization is to effectively deliver excellent application service in order to support mission-critical business applications. The challenge for IT management, however, is to provide this high level of service while controlling the operating and capital costs of the underlying infrastructure. The new release of Vantage supports both imperatives.

"We recently invested in an upgrade of one of our core business applications, but when we released the software to the users, we experienced performance degradation. While the software package vendor wanted to blame our network and our servers, Vantage clearly demonstrated that the application was the culprit," said Graydon Blair, Applications Systems Specialist at Intermountain Health Care. "Without the insight provided by Vantage, we would have incurred tremendous cost to upgrade our infrastructure. If all else failed, we were even prepared to replace the application itself."

In addition to helping organizations identify ways to maintain or reduce costs, Vantage also serves as a planning solution for many organizations. As Sutter Health progresses toward a standard set of applications, the operations team has found Vantage extremely useful for rightsizing network infrastructure. Vantage provides detailed assessments of the impact of new sites on the infrastructure.

"When someone comes to us and says we are going to roll out six new sites, our team can provide estimates about how much bandwidth each application is going to need, the size of the circuit required, and most importantly, estimates about how much it will cost," said Scott Jester, senior networking engineer with the Sutter Health operations team. "Vantage is definitely enabling our company to make better decisions about infrastructure sizing."

"By tying infrastructure management to service management, IT can become a more valuable partner in helping to create competitive advantage for a business," said John Williams, Product Line Director, Compuware. "Organizations that are adopting Vantage are finding that they can be more aggressive in reducing infrastructure cost while still fulfilling their fundamental commitment to service delivery."

Getting Started
Compuware provides best practices and implementation services that can help organizations quickly realize the benefits of a service-oriented approach to infrastructure management. Vantage 9.1 is available immediately. For more information on Vantage, please visit http://www.compuware.com/vantage.

Compuware Corporation
Compuware Corporation (NASDAQ: CPWR) is a world leader in delivering software and services that enable businesses to manage their enterprises and maximize the value of their IT assets. Compuware solutions accelerate the development, improve the quality and enhance the performance of business-driving applications. Founded in 1973, Compuware serves the world's leading IT organizations, including more than 90 percent of the Fortune 100 companies. Learn more about Compuware at http://www.compuware.com.