Smarts links reporting with monitoring

Real-time fault management and historical reporting, normally two separate activities in network management, will be brought closer together in a deal between reporting specialist Concord and fault management company Smarts. Smarts' InCharge service management suite will be integrated with Concord's eHealth reporting suite, so users can ask for a Concord report on an event detected by InCharge. Smarts' salesforce will resell eHealth, while Condord will refer customers to Smarts for fault management features. "The integration of Smarts and Concord products is already complete, and a large cellphone service has adopted it," said Roger Pilc, chief operating officer of Smarts. "This goes one step further than our Adapters strategy," he said, referring to Smarts' policy of building interfaces to other companies' management products. There is no bundling or price reduction element in the deal, which relies on increased value through integration, he said. Concord had a turnover of $88m last year, with Smarts apparently about half that size. Smarts intends to sell the combination of products as a full replacement for HP's market-leading but increasingly tired-looking management product, HP OpenView. Customers are usually reluctant to retire a product like OpenView that has cost them a lot of money in purchase cost and consultancy, but Pilc reckons the on-going costs of the HP product are so big that users should think about it. "We can prove a return on investment from actually replacing OpenView," he said.

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