Tideway Systems Simplifies Mapping Application Dependencies

I had the delightful opportunity to speak with Richard Muirhead, Tideway Systems' Founder and CEO, about the launch of the newest release of Tideway Foundation. The company is focused on making life simpler for IT administrators who are doing their best to keep up with a rapidly changing IT environment that is based upon services running on Windows, Unix, Linux and Netware.

Here's how Tideway Describes Foundation 7.1

Need To Understand Complex Business Applications?

To run IT like a business, organizations need repeatable and automated processes. Central to these processes is current and reliable information about the IT infrastructure, allowing you to plan, execute and measure progress with confidence. However, most organizations have a limited understanding of how this IT infrastructure supports business applications and initiatives.

The 360-Degree View of Your IT Infrastructure

Tideway Foundation™ automatically maps business applications to the underlying physical and virtual infrastructure, including the critical dependencies between them. Using extensible, model-driven and agent-free indexing techniques, Foundation provides a 360-degree view of how all components of the IT infrastructure support the business – across all technology layers.

Snapshot Analysis

Quite  a number of corporate applications in today's IT infrastructure are implemented as  multi-tier, distributed, multi-platform functions flying in a rather loose formation. It's quite difficult to determine what functions rely on what other functions, what the current patch level is of each of those components, or even what functions will feel an impact when something is updated or changed. What's even more challenging is that often each of the functions resides on systems owned or managed by some other business unit.

Tideway has seen this problem and has come up with an interesting product that will assess what works with what and how each application is actually constructed. It can then provide information for teams of administrators that can lay out what impact a change over here will have on a function over there.

It seems that this product is something IT administrators would find rather useful.  It's a bit like having "people" to work for you as a recent ad compaign for a tax preparation company says. This might mean that an IT administrator might actually be able to take a day off once in a while.