TeamQuest Outlines Software Roadmap

TeamQuest is ramping up its release schedule to provide users with a quality product without disrupting customer environments. Moving forward, users will realize tremendous benefits in terms of greater business alignment and competitive advantage.

"Many of our clients view TeamQuest as a secret weapon," says TeamQuest product manager Scott Adams. "They don't want the competition to know how they manage to keep IT costs down while increasing overall efficiency."

Adams says the goal behind the release strategy is to raise the level of analysis as a whole and provide more ways to analyze and report - higher-level reporting is essential in order to comprehend business and technical views.

Each quarter, TeamQuest will provide an update to its software. Let's take a closer look at the first major release.

TeamQuest Software Release 10.2
Scheduled for availability in 2008, Release 10.2 will expand on the software's ability to model various virtual environments. TeamQuest agents are being augmented to keep pace with changes in technology, including existing and new applications and operating systems.

TeamQuest's automatic software maintenance is being enhanced to provide automatic upgrades to new releases in addition to automatic application of patches.

Adams says the company is providing additional reporting, publishing and usability enhancements to its IT Service Analyzer and IT Service Reporter products that will make them easier to use and more powerful.

"For example, if a CPU utilization chart is being viewed, users can then overlay that with hardware inventory data to see if a process went offline," says Adams. "Additional charts can be pulled onto that page to see how they correlate."

Capitalizing on Virtualized Environments
TeamQuest is planning to include IBM Hypervisor and mainframe support for virtualization, support for Intel hyperthreaded environments, and support for Sun T1 and T2 processors in Release 10.2.

Look for a new VMware agent supporting VMware clustering, and upgraded agents for WebSphere, WebLogic, Oracle and a wide range of operating systems. Many of these features will be made available as quarterly updates.

Get Access to Information
In order to provide capacity managers with greater levels of accessibility when and where they want it, TeamQuest is exploiting Web 2.0 technology to keep management and clients aware of the latest capacity related developments.

Release 10.2 will facilitate more rapid report generation for business managers, outsourcing clients and end users. This complements the reporting functionality introduced in Release 10.1, which included customized reporting via features such as explanatory text, graphics and corporate logos.

Future Releases
Upcoming software releases will further exploit the IT Resource concept by providing automatic detection and reporting of critical resources within an enterprise using sophisticated pattern analysis.

"We want to enable capacity managers to automate many analysis tasks that currently require a long series of manual steps," says Adams. "It's about making your life easier. The focus is on refining our own areas of core competency while making our software play well with other tools that are commonly used in IT management."