Boole & Babbage Inc says it has delivered on its promise of continuing to support the customer base of its MAXM Systems Corp acquisition (CI No 3,062), and launched new products for them only 90 days after completion of the purchase (CI No 3,155). The company, which regards itself as a leader in end-to-end availability managment software, has added intelligent availability agents to MAX/Enterprise, the MAXM equivalent of Boole & Babbage’s own COMMAND/Post product. It has also announced PhonePoint, an automated call escalation product. The Command Agents proactively manage the optimization of end-user service levels for enterprise systems, and are available for most flavors of Unix as well as Novell Inc NetWare, Windows NT and OS/2. The company, which is also eager to grow its standing in the IBM Corp MQSeries messaging market, has also released MQ agent extensions, and expanded its Command MQ product suite for managing multi- system MQSeries networks. Boole is also developing a full Windows NT client, and already has an NT user interface which can be used with either MAX/Enterprise or COMMAND/Post. The full NT client will be object-oriented, ActiveX-compliant and Web-enabled. Its is due next month. Saverio Merlo, the company’s senior vice president of marketing, says MAXM’s customer base was one of the major attractions for the purchase, and the company was keen to counter their skepticism when it promised it would continue to support and develop the product. The company’s name is often mentioned along with the likes of Tivoli Systems Inc, Computer Associates Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co, who are tipped to become the big three in the field in the next few years. Merlo says Boole & Babbage does not compete with these, rather it specializes in end-to-end management, and as such partners with Tivoli and integrates with Computer Associates.
