Computer Associates today announced Unicenter TND (The Next Dimension), groundbreaking technology that offers organizations the unprecedented opportunity to control and manage their global enterprises from the perspective of time. Unicenter TND incorporates three revolutionary technological advances: * Time dimensionality that enables users to travel through time as they manage their environment. * Neural network agents (neugents) that learn, predict and resolve problems before they arise. * Advanced user interface technology that leverages Unicenter`s Real World Interface to let users see the future. Built on the Jasmine-based object repository for the management of time-series objects, Unicenter TND is the first self-managing solution for dealing with complex IT infrastructures. "New technology has never made such a compelling business case in the IT industry," said CA Chairman and CEO Charles B. Wang. "For the first time, we are giving clients a solution that will make time an ally instead of an enemy." "CA is the first vendor to embark on an initiative that we believe could transform enterprise management as we presently know it," said Colin Mahony, analyst, The Yankee Group. "By combining neugent technology with the Real World Interface and time dimension, CA is the first in its class to propose a solution that not only addresses the needs of users today, but also their needs down the road." It`s About Time: A New Focus On Management By focusing on the time dimension in a consistent and rigorous manner, Unicenter TND allows managers to address business challenges that, until now, have been entirely beyond their ability to analyze. "Until Unicenter TND, organizations had to accept management tools that were by definition reactive because they were limited to dealing with the here and now," Wang said. "By creating an infrastructure to collect and manage historic information in terms of how series of events are related in time, Unicenter TND gives users a powerful way to manage an environment the way it is, the way it has changed, and the way it probably will be." While most enterprise management systems allow an organization to deal with a set of conditions as they exist, only Unicenter TND allows that organization to deal with the same set of conditions at any point in time. Unicenter TND also gives the organization the tools to display the delta between the present and past state. "Introducing the time element with Unicenter TND makes predictive and proactive management possible," said Steve Foote, director of research, Hurwitz Group. "Managing the coming onslaught of component-based applications will be impossible without such advanced neural analysis." Neugents: Neural Network Technology Comes Of Age Neugents, software agents that apply neural networks to address compelling business problems, transform every aspect of enterprise management in bold new ways. More powerful than linear rate change trend analysis and more sophisticated than rule-based systems, neural network technology rationalizes the behavior of complex, multi-dimensional variables in a way that makes meaningful predictive analysis possible. "In the past, IT managers did well to quickly identify and resolve problems before they caused too much damage," said Wang. "That`s not good enough anymore. Organizations today demand service levels that preclude outages from occurring in the first place. Neugents fundamentally change the way IT resources are managed." Neugents reproduce some functions of the human brain, such as self-learning, with mathematical models implemented in software. A neugent learns a particular task when given historical data relevant to the task. During training, the model is tuned so that the neugent can generalize the relationships underlying the specific patterns in the historical data. Once trained, a neugent can be used to recognize a situation, make an evaluation, reach a conclusion or take action. Neugent technology has implications for predicting system failures and outages, optimizing performance, job scheduling and workload management. Neugent technology promises to be able to predict new classes of desirable or undesirable events, such as avoiding new viruses, by predicting their behavior and triggering an alert when the precursors to such behavior is detected. Neugent technology can also serve as a powerful early warning system by recognizing security breach patterns, device outages and performance problems, and capacity-related issues. Neugents have profound implications across all enterprise management areas including asset management, capacity planning, storage utilization, security policy administration, performance management and virus detection. See The Future Unicenter TND offers new visualization technology for helping decision makers understand relationships within complex multi-dimensional data. A compelling 3D Real World Interface gives users a VCR-like control panel to scroll backward and forward in time. As the user rewinds and fast-forwards through the time dimension, the graphical representation of the IT environment under consideration unfolds in three dimensions on the Real World Interface. Applying 3D object rendering and animation, the interface enhances the ability of managers to visualize and pinpoint problems in the IT environment and makes it easy to grasp even the most subtle relationships between enterprise resources. "With the visualization properties of Unicenter TND, administrators will be able to logically depict correlations, relationships, and properties that now elude most analytical initiatives," said Wang. "As administrators scroll backwards or forwards in time, they can see the transition states actually change and drill down to see the data underlying the states at each point in time." Unicenter TND Availability Unicenter TND is scheduled to be available in 1999. To enable Unicenter TNG clients to start reaping the benefits of this technology, CA is making available the neugents as add-on options to Unicenter TNG 2.2, starting today. These initial neugents deal with performance and availability.
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