Covalent Unwraps Management Offering For Open Source

12/09/2003

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Covalent Technologies, a maker of Web application management solutions, debuted Covalent Application Manager (CAM), which it calls “the first complete management solution for the open source stack.”

Covalent says its Application Manager “manages all major open source Web application resources including Tomcat, Jboss, Linux, Apache, and MySQL, solving the current ‘Achilles heel’ of enterprise open source adoption.”

Covalent also announced two enterprise customers for the solution.

The customers utilizing CAM to manage their open source stack are La Quinta, a hotel chain with more than 360 properties in 33 states, and National Semiconductor, an analog technology company with yearly sales over $1.67 billion. Covalent says, “This customer adoption is testament to the power of CAM to manage the growing number of open source resources deployed in the enterprise.”

Separately, Covalent said it has joined the DCML organization.

“With Covalent's help, we’ve made the move from closed source Web and application servers to open source technologies like Tomcat and Apache,” said Ulrich Seif, CIO and Senior VP of National Semiconductor. “Covalent Application Manager is managing some of our most critical business intelligence applications. CAM gives us visibility into these applications and helps us perform root cause analysis. Covalent’s open source expertise combined with CAM’s unique application management made it a natural fit for our infrastructure.”

“We’ve moved our Web applications away from proprietary servers to open source, namely JBoss, Tomcat, and Apache,” said Raven Zachary, director of Internet Technology at La Quinta. "As a strong supporter of open source, Covalent offers a comprehensive management solution for our mission-critical applications, including our customer reservations application. The move to open source is delivering decreased cost and greater control, and we believe that Covalent Application Manager will provide improved availability and performance in our environment.”

Covalent observes, “There is an industry mandate for open source management software. Industry research firm IDC expects the system management market for Linux and other open source technology to grow by a compound annual growth rate of 33 percent between 2002 and 2007[1]. This is one of the fastest growing segments in the performance and availability management software market.

“According to a recent survey conducted by CIO Magazine, executives said that within five years open source would be their dominant server platform. This comes as no surprise since the recent adoption of open source technology by the enterprise has risen at an astronomical pace. As companies have discovered the price/performance of Linux, other open source projects like the Apache Web server and the Jboss and Tomcat application servers have fully taken hold. But as these products have gained in popularity, their users have been faced with a management dilemma: How can they deliver the performance and availability required of their open source applications without a comprehensive management solution? Covalent, building on its open source legacy, created Covalent Application Manager to fulfill this need.

“With Covalent Application Manager, enterprise users now have access to the only comprehensive management solution for the entire open source stack. This means they can improve availability on business applications while retaining the cost and performance advantages of open source. In one solution, users can map, measure, control and analyze their open source infrastructure – all within a solution that fully utilizes open source technologies.”

The open source software resources under management in CAM include, IN COVALENT’S WORDS:

• Linux – many flavors of the popular operating system



• Jboss – a Java application server that is growing in popularity



• Tomcat – an Apache Software Foundation application server



• Apache – the world’s most widely used Web server



• MySQL – the most popular open source database

“It’s no longer a question of whether enterprises use open source; it’s now a question of how to maximize the availability and performance of those applications,” said John M. Jack, chief executive officer of Covalent. “If you build it, you have to manage it. Using Covalent Application Manager enables the enterprise to garner all the advantages of open source while maintaining the service quality demanded of their Java applications.”

Covalent ASSERTS IT IS “uniquely positioned to create the solution for open source management. Founders of Covalent helped develop Apache, the world’s most widely used Web server and a bell-weather for open source success. Covalent added to this legacy by enhancing Apache for enterprise use, making it more reliable and more manageable, and by contributing enterprise support for other open source projects such as Tomcat. Over the past four years Covalent has helped 150 of the Fortune 500 manage their open source infrastructure. This real-world experience translates into a product that can solve the open source management challenge.

“With CAM, IT operations can perform all the necessary tasks associated with managing applications. Iin one solution users can map applications and supporting resources, measure application service levels and resolve problems quickly, control applications to resolve problems, and analyze application data for reporting, forecasting and planning.

“CAM presents one integrated application view by automatically discovering and then correlating multiple components of a Web application. By combining its application model with a comprehensive solution that covers all operational activities, Covalent is moving the management of Web applications beyond the current disjointed server approach to integrated Web application management,” Covalent concludes.