MKS Integrity is a unified platform with a common repository that collectively provides tools for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), from requirements through to deployment. It addresses the need by IT departments to adopt more effective management of their internal processes, in order to reduce costs, improve quality, and meet compliance needs. MKS has taken an organic approach to developing a well-integrated platform that is delivered to users via workflow-based processes, and enables enforcement …
Technology Audits - published 18/07/2008 - Angela Eager, Karthik Balakrishnan, Somak Roy
Lixto’s Online Market Intelligence solution, which includes vertical offerings for the travel, consumer goods, and electronics industries, provides an automated way of extracting (primarily pricing data) from Web sites and repurposing it for notification, analytics, and dashboard reporting. Companies need to respond quickly to changes in competitor offerings but traditional market research methods cannot meet the speed and data coverage requirements of the online world. Lixto provides modules for visuall…
Technology Audits - published 18/07/2008 - Angela Eager, Karthik Balakrishnan, Somak Roy
SafeGuard Enterprise is a product set that addresses organisational needs for encryption, user authentication, and security management to counter security threats in a number of end-user computing environment types. It can provide protection for local and network-based file systems, mobile computing devices, removable media, and protection against content loss via e-mail attachments, along with strong password management and user authentication. Its cenralised management can improve efficiency, and allow…
Technology Audits - published 18/07/2008 - Alan Rodger, Karthik Balakrishnan, Somak Roy
ComputerLand Managed Services centre on the provision of essential IT services to organisations of typically between 1,000 and 10,000 seats. Many organisations do not have the delivery of IT services to the business as a core competence, and as such look to third-party providers to deliver these services on their behalf. Although the importance of a partnership relationship between the customer organisation and the Managed Services Provider (MSP) is much touted by all MSPs, there is clear evidence that C…
Technology Audits - published 18/07/2008 - Maxine Holt
Active Navigation provides a data discovery solution based upon a theming engine, which will help organisations discover the information assets they have; cleanse duplicate, redundant, and inappropriate content; develop and manage content-based fileplans or taxonomies to classify unstructured data; migrate content to new filing structures or Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Electronic Document and Records Management (EDRM) systems; and offer intuitive guided navigation for information discovery. T…
Technology Audits - published 18/07/2008 - Aanchal Sabharwal, Mark Blowers
4TRESS Authentication Server (4TRESS AS), from ActivIdentity, is an enterprise-strength, standards-based server that allows organisations to manage authentication, transaction authorisation, credential management, and associated audit logging more flexibly and efficiently. Many organisations are constrained by having no way to extend value from tactical adoptions of authentication technology, and are also unable to attain economies of scale in deploying stronger authentication models, having often been d…
Technology Audits - published 18/07/2008 - Alan Rodger
blueKiwi provides a social networking solution aimed at promoting informal communication and collaboration within large enterprises. The communication is structured around Communities, which are in effect public forums, and Workshops, which are private collaboration sites. The blueKiwi enterprise social software platform provides a range of features, such as blogs, RSS feeds, and Wikis. Content publishing and tagging are key facets of this offering, both of which combine to build a rich set of metadata o…
Technology Audits - published 18/07/2008 - Richard Edwards, Somak Roy
CA SiteMinder Web Access Manager provides policy based authentication and authorisation, supports multiple advanced authentication techniques, identity federation, and single sign on for Web applications. Traditionally, access management infrastructure has been developed separately for each Web application, leading to duplication and limited control and audit capability. SiteMinder provides centralised capabilities plus extensive additional facilities. Butler Group is impressed with its fine-grained auth…
Technology Audits - published 18/07/2008 - Aanchal Sabharwal, Angela Eager, Somak Roy
The HP Integrated Archive Platform (IAP) is a key component of the HP Information Management (IM) suite of products and services, and serves as a platform for all types of reference information, including e-mail, file, and database objects. Application awareness, content-based indexing, and powerful search tools provides enterprise-wide accessibility to archived information, securely controlled by interfacing with role-based directory services. HP IAP assists in complying with retention and regulatory re…
Technology Audits - published 18/07/2008 - Mike Thompson
Sunrise Software through Sostenuto Foundation and Sostenuto ITSM offers a rules-driven, browser-based Service Desk solution built around the IT Information Library (ITIL) framework. Sostenuto Foundation incorporates basic Service Desk functionalities such as incident and problem management, service level management, and configuration management, and is aimed at organisations wanting to adopt a phased approach to ITIL adoption. Sostenuto ITSM builds on the aforementioned capabilities of Sostenuto Foundati…
Technology Audits - published 18/07/2008 - Rob Hailstone
Unica Affinium 7 is an end-to-end marketing platform providing a central management and execution resource for all marketing functions and users. Automating and optimising the marketing function has been an uphill battle within most organisations, due to cultural resistance and a lack of suitable tools capable of dealing with the multiple types of activities and touch points that marketing requires with other applications and external parties. Marketing is under increasing pressure to become more efficie…
Technology Audits - published 18/07/2008 - Angela Eager
CiRBA provides value-enhancing support for data centre consolidation and virtualisation initiatives, and ongoing management of infrastructures incorporating virtualisation (across multiple vendor platforms). In adopting virtualisation, organisations risk failure to overcome the risks of their transformational investment in virtualisation, and other advanced technologies, becoming a new, long-term management problem. CiRBA supports transformational initiatives to initially optimise infrastructure environm…
Technology Audits - published 18/07/2008 - Aanchal Sabharwal, Alan Rodger, Somak Roy
HCL, through its Managed Desktop Services (MDS) solution, offers a set of services that cater to all aspects of the end-user computing environment, including asset management, desktop security, desktop Operating System (OS) and application imaging, and service desk support, all of which are delivered on a per-desktop, fixed-price model through the company’s offshore delivery centres. HCL’s delivery model revolves around standardising the client’s desktop environment and enforcing policies that enable adh…
Technology Audits - published 18/07/2008 - Balachandar Ganesh, Maxine Holt, Somak Roy
Zend is the company behind the PHP programming language. PHP is one of the well-known components of the Linux Apache MySQL PHP/Perl/Python (LAMP) stack that helped grow the Internet – the Apache Web server, for example, is still the most common Web server found, and a large proportion of these support PHP. The PHP community, at 4.5 million, is one of the largest, and there are around 1000 who regularly contribute to open source PHP projects. Yahoo!, Flickr, and YouTube are example high-profile users of P…
Technology Audits - published 16/07/2008 - Michael Azoff
With the practice of collaboration – between individuals within the same organisation and with external parties – becoming more widely adopted, organisations need a formal method of managing information movement that allows easy collaboration without compromising on security. Workshare Professional 5.2 provides an application that allows multiple contributors to work on the same document, providing document lifecycle management capabilities comprising document compare and review, plus a secure publishing…
Technology Audits - published 16/07/2008 - Angela Eager
CA Insight™ Database Performance Monitor for Distributed Databases (CA Insight DPM) is aimed at reducing the costs and complexities involved in managing a distributed, multi-vendor database environment. The solution offers a unified view of all databases in an organisation’s IT infrastructure, complete with drill-down capabilities to monitor and analyse Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and overall health. The solution offers tight integration with CA TSreorg™for Distributed Datbases and CA Fast Unload® …
Technology Audits - published 16/07/2008 - Balachandar Ganesh, Roy Illsley
Macro 4 has released its Application Performance Portal (A.P.P.) to address the need for monitoring Java applications in one easy-to-use Web-based package. The company has a background in mainframes and as a result it can offer performance monitoring of applications on a wide range of platforms – mainframe and distributed computing. A.P.P. also has deep database monitoring and can correlate events between database and applications and vice versa. The product has emphasis on usability through its intuitiv…
Technology Audits - published 16/07/2008 - Michael Azoff
BDNA Insight 5.0, an IT asset-mapping solution aimed at the office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO), performs hardware and software asset discovery through an agentless, non-intrusive process, identifies IT infrastructure resources using a patented fingerprinting mechanism, and provides trend-based analytics. The inventory data and analytics capability can be used for initiatives such as vendor rationalisation, licensing negotiation, licensing compliance audits, and data centre migrations, areas wh…
Technology Audits - published 16/07/2008 - Aanchal Sabharwal, Angela Eager, Somak Roy
planningIT is an enterprise architecture management solution aimed at optimising IT investments and improving the alignment of IT to business strategy while supporting and maturing IT planning capabilities. It does this by providing integrated business demand management, solution assessment, and project portfolio optimisation modules based on a logical IT inventory that also supports technology standardisation, architecture patterning, migration, and release management. The solution captures data related…
Technology Audits - published 11/07/2008 - Aanchal Sabharwal, Richard Edwards, Somak Roy
Grid Tools’ GT-Datamaker is a test data generation and test data management tool aimed at enhancing developer and tester productivity through features that promote creation of standardised data sets, reuse, and wide code coverage, in addition to enabling essential test data selection and generation tasks such as subsetting and masking of sensitive production data. The GT-Datamaker revolves around a centralised repository of test data that allows role–based access to test data objects that also offers inh…
Technology Audits - published 24/06/2008 - Karthik Balakrishnan, Michael Azoff, Somak Roy
FloSuite is a Microsoft .NET-based Rapid Application Development (RAD) solution for building composite applications. It is aimed at supporting content-based human-driven business processes that involve integration with document management solutions, line-of-business applications, legacy industry-specific software, and productivity and messaging applications. The suite comprises a Microsoft Visio-based process modelling solution, the FloDesigner, a process execution component, the FloServer, and the FloCl…
Technology Audits - published 19/06/2008 - Karthik Balakrishnan, Michael Azoff, Somak Roy
Ounce, from Ounce Labs, analyses source code to produce precise details and remediation advice about the vulnerabilities found in application software. It covers application elements from Web front-ends to back-office server modules, with the capability to analyse dozens of different coding languages, and refers to a knowledge base, and industry-standard information about known vulnerabilities. Application weaknesses are being increasingly exploited maliciously, as they are relatively easy targets compar…
Technology Audits - published 19/06/2008 - Alan Rodger, Karthik Balakrishnan, Somak Roy
Perforce SCM is a dedicated Software Change and Configuration Management (SCCM) tool. Its key attributes are speed of operation, high scalability, connectivity via TCP/IP, and small footprint. The Perforce system is architected to minimise network traffic and yet has the power to manage the most complex development efforts, spanning multiple projects, versions, and releases, with multiple source build requirements. To achieve this performance, Perforce’s TCP/IP-based streaming message protocol delivers f…
Technology Audits - published 19/06/2008 - Michael Azoff
Visual Studio 2008 (VS) comprises a range of products that cater for enterprise developers and project managers down to beginning programmers. The flagship product is an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution, VS Team System (VSTS), that has four editions focused on role activity: Architecture; Database; Development; and Test. VS will serve Microsoft platform developers well and in combination with ecosystem partners for fulfilling missing segments of lifecycle tooling, the solution is in Butler…
Technology Audits - published 19/06/2008 - Michael Azoff
Neptuny CAPLAN, is a capacity management solution that is aimed at frequent and comprehensive business- oriented capacity planning with minimum resource investments. CAPLAN is agentless, and the solution uses standard and custom connectors as well as Extract Transform and Load (ETL) technology to populate a data warehouse with infrastructure data from system monitoring and management tools, and business-related data drawn from business applications. The solution correlates the data between infrastructure…
Technology Audits - published 17/06/2008 - Aanchal Sabharwal, Roy Illsley, Somak Roy
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