Mercury Interactive launches the first product that automatically finds elusive performance problems that plague production systems

To help companies identify and solve hard-to-remedy problems within their corporate IT systems, Mercury Interactive Corporation, the leading provider of software and services that optimize automated business processes, today launched ProTune.

ProTune is the industry`s first tuning software that enables companies to proactively optimize the performance and reliability of critical applications, resulting in improved customer satisfaction, and reduced TCO (total cost of ownership).

By proactively tuning applications, infrastructure, and security systems, companies can align IT deliverables and business goals by optimizing the performance of their business processes, without additional IT spending. ProTune takes a proactive approach to tuning production systems that antiquates the current reactive and hit or miss method that often leaves IT 'fighting fires` as they arise.

According to Anand Ramachandram, director and senior vice president, information services, Asia Pacific at T.D. Waterhouse: "ProTune has many benefits for the business, particularly scalability and flexibility. Our business is growing fast and IT has to keep up with it. Tuning is an important technology that saves costs, time and resources which every IT manager has to take into account. ProTune gives us more control over our business and has increased our ability to make accurate decisions regarding our infrastructure."

Through experience gained in close to 3000 tuning engagements, Mercury Interactive has found that 70 percent of application issues can be resolved by tuning production systems, and performance can often increase by more than 400 percent.

After traditional pre-deployment testing, during which an application is tested and readiness is verified in a lab environment, ProTune establishes the next phase, production tuning. The tuning phase is required because the test environments are lacking many components that dramatically affect the operation of the IT system, such as load balancers, networks, gateways, server clusters, security devices and sometimes the Internet. These differences can prevent problems from being discovered in the lab environment.

ProTune`s proactive approach works by taking a baseline measurement of a production system, and then performs rigorous tuning exercises that unearth and isolate bottlenecks within the infrastructure, applications, and security systems. Once the problem areas have been identified, ProTune provides recommendations to help fine-tune the systems for optimal performance. Additionally, ProTune is equipped with customized "Tuners," an innovative technology that allow fixes to be easily made from within the unified tuning console.

"During the recent times of economic boom, many companies were able to build and deploy complex IT systems, often Web-based, with few constraints on spending to achieve performance objectives," said Tim Grieser, program vice president at IDC. "Now, with the focus on cost savings and improving ROI, most IT departments are faced with little or no increased spending, and must optimize their existing systems. This greatly increases the importance to IT of tuning their systems and applications in order to extract needed performance from existing hardware and software."

ProTune is based on the technology and process employed by Mercury Interactive`s production tuning service, ActiveTune. Leveraging the methodologies, and experience gained from thousands of ActiveTune engagements; ProTune offers the solution for those customers who wish to perform production tuning and optimization.

ProTune provides a unique system topology-mapping tool whereby users can define the IT architecture, which then automatically configures tuning sessions for that specific environment. Designed with the safety of production system as a priority, ProTune can monitor and protect the IT system while it tunes. With its user definable alerts and responses, ProTune ensures that tuning sessions remain tightly controlled.

If an event triggers an alert, the affected component indicates on ProTune`s topology map, letting the user immediately know where the trouble is located, allowing for faster problem isolation. ProTune includes built-in infrastructure and security tuning sessions created by Mercury Interactive tuning experts. With its security tuning capabilities, ProTune can determine if security devices will successfully defend the network when heavy traffic and hacking attacks occur simultaneously.

Using traditional methods, intermittent problems can be difficult to solve given their random nature. ProTune`s tuning sessions are repeatable so customers can reproduce problems and validate fixes.

Mercury Interactive delivers the most complete and integrated family of enterprise testing production tuning and performance management solutions, enabling customers to optimize IT systems for maximum business results. ProTune leverages customer`s investments in LoadRunner, the industry standard load testing solution, by enabling customers to easily reuse pre-production application-level scripts within ProTune and with Mercury Interactive`s Topaz for post-deployment application performance management. Additionally, ProTune enables customers to validate their system and/or a partner`s system ability to meet SLAs (service level agreements). This data can be used to provide a baseline for performance management solutions.

Mercury Interactive`s ProTune will be generally available on a subscription basis this month. Mercury Interactive`s tuning solutions start at $210KUS. ProTune supported environments include ERP/CRM, Web, Java, J2EE, and enterprise applications. More information can be found at http://www.mercuryinteractive.com/products/production_tuning/.