E-commerce management is making strides

The leading network and system management vendors are in a race to extend their product lines to manage e-business applications and transactions. While observers are glad to see the vendors moving in this direction, they say the companies need to make up for a slow start and deliver stronger tools in areas such as security.

Aprisma, BMC Software, Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard and Tivoli are all enabling their products to play better in e-business environments, to meet customer needs and ward off threats from more-focused start-ups.

"The tremendous growth of e-commerce is a driver for us in network management," says Rose DeBruin, solutions manager for HP OpenView. Citing a report from Cambridge, Mass., firm Forrester Research, she says business-to-business transactions will grow from $43 billion in 1998 to $1.3 trillion in 2003.

Tools being added to platforms include those for monitoring Web site performance, managing e-commerce applications and enforcing quality-of-service priorities among Web servers.

CA has been among the most aggressive platform vendors in pursuing the e-commerce management opportunity.

The company recently announced plans to deliver Web portal-based technology for its Unicenter TNG platform. The technology will let employees whose jobs depend on Web-based systems get different views of the network depending on the nature of their job. A net manager, for instance, would get more detailed information than a CEO or customer service representative.

CA is complementing Unicenter with several other technologies that can also help companies running e-commerce sites. CA's Jasmineii software can be used to link Web storefronts to back-end data sources and can serve as a Web portal or application server, among other things. Jasmineii also works with CA's Neugent technology, which can be used to customize Web pages for individual users as well as predict potential failures in e-commerce servers and networks.

Users such as Scott Henry, a network systems manager at PC ServiceSource in Dallas, is pleased that CA is making strides in e-commerce management. But he says CA and other vendors have plenty of work to do in areas of protecting customers' nets from viruses and denial-of-service attacks.

Henry, who uses Unicenter to manage the company's Windows NT- and HP-UX-based net, says nearly one-third of his company's revenue is derived from online sales, so the ability to make sure the firm's eight Web servers are up and running is crucial, especially at night when the staff is absent.

Henry uses CA's Unicenter Web Management Option to monitor the availability of his company's Web pages. Before this, he had nothing to tell him what his customers' experiences were like when downloading Web pages. CA's product also lets him know if someone has altered content on the company's Web site, he says.

BMC, meanwhile, offers Patrol for E-business Management, a product that lets information systems staff monitor firewalls, Web transactions and even specific products such as Microsoft's Site Server Commerce Edition. BMC added a feature to its Patrol 2000 flagship product that will do root-cause analysis in failed Web devices or applications.

The company recently bought Evity, which offers a service for measuring Web site performance. The service, dubbed SiteAngel, simulates transactions, such as the purchase of a book, and measures the performance time for each step of the process. If the Web site malfunctions, IS staff will be notified.

For its part, HP offers VantagePoint Internet Services software to let companies manage both their Web servers, whether they are accessible internally or externally. The software measures availability and response time of such servers and feeds the results to HP OpenView Network Node. The software can also be used by IS staff to set and enforce network resource priorities.

Another competitor, Tivoli, has announced an e-business heavy edition of NetView, its network management software. Included in Version 6.0 is SmartSets, software for defining different classes of devices or applications - for instance, routers carrying key e-business traffic across a WAN - and writing rules that only apply to them.

In the same vein, Aprisma's new Spectrum 6.0 is geared to help IS staff prioritize key e-business applications and devices. Among other features, Spectrum now has artificial intelligence to model the effects of a Web server crash and help determine what parts of the network must receive priority attention.