Waltham, Massachusetts-based performance management outfit BGS Systems Inc has launched Release 5.0 of its BEST/1 performance management software that gives Unix and NT systems managers mainframe-style system performance management tools for distributed, client-server systems. Originally a supplier of IBM Corp mainframe performance tools, BGS claims in the past two years it has seen a complete turnaround in where its business is coming from, with the UK reporting some 80% of its revenue now coming from Unix systems. Worldwide, the company expects to report revenue for the year to January of around $50m, of which about 40% comes from Europe and 50% from the US and Canada. UK managing director David Cooper says mainframe sites take performance management for granted, and assume there are tools out there to help them monitor the workload on a system and identify bottlenecks and performance problems. He reckons these disciplines do not always exist in the Unix world, and particularly in distributed systems, where system managers may look at individual Unix nodes but not at the enterprise-wide picture. Cooper said the company is totally focused on performance management, and positions itself as a best of breed product to be integrated with general infrastructure products from the likes of Tivoli Systems Inc and Boole & Babbage Inc. BEST/1 consists of a Visualizer, which enables a system manager to view the performance of all machines on a network, whether a mainframe running MVS or a server running any flavor of Unix from a single console, in graphical form. It can identify bottlenecks at a given time of day or day of the week, and enable companies to reschedule workloads, or move jobs to run on machines with spare capacity. It produces automatic reports and warns when problems occur. Predict gives what-if modeling capabilities to enable managers to assess the implications of adding new users or applications to a system, and Monitor is a real-time graphical monitor that highlights performance problems and enables users to drill-down to specific bottlenecks on specific systems. Release 5.0 includes support for SAP AG’s R3 software, which Cooper says can be a performance black hole for systems managers. BEST/1 enables them to know who’s using SAP, how, where and when, he says. The new release also includes RAID redundant array of independent disks support, integration with Tivoli Systems Inc’s Tivoli TME 10 system and network management environment, and support for ODBC Open Database Connectivity-compliant databases. BSG said the majority of its software is also available for Windows NT, but it does not expect great demand for NT until it has been fully deployed in major enterprise systems. Cooper said within six months the whole suite will be available for NT. The company sees particular opportunities for its software with Year 2000 work being undertaken, where companies will need to measure the impact of the program fixing and testing, and re-deploy or upgrade system capacity.
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