Software aligns IT with business priorities.

Press Release Summary:



Compuware Vantage 9 Application Performance Management Software helps IT organizations identify and resolve problems before they impact business. It unites mangement-level views with end-to-end performance analysis capabilities. Summary views highlight performance by application and location, while detailed heat charts allow IT to identify service violations and application outages by time of day, day of week, and transactions affected.



Original Press Release:



Compuware Application Performance Management Solution Aligns IT With Business Priorities



Compuware Vantage 9 Enables IT to Deliver Service Excellence With Unique Combination of Management Views and Rich Analytics

DETROIT--December 15, 2003--Compuware Corporation (NASDAQ: CPWR) today unveiled its next generation application service management solution. Compuware Vantage 9 enables Information Technology (IT) organizations to deliver service excellence by systematically and proactively improving application performance, as driven by business priorities. By monitoring application service from the end-user perspective rather than just monitoring infrastructure components, Vantage helps IT organizations identify and resolve problems before they impact the business. Vantage 9 provides additional value by uniting management-level views with end-to-end performance analysis capabilities.

"To communicate with business managers, Information Services (IS) organizations need business-relevant data regarding the availability, performance, user experience and service levels being delivered by the IT infrastructure," said Debra Curtis, Research Director, Gartner. "This requires an investment in end-to-end response time measurement and service level reporting tools."

Aligning IT With Business Priorities
New capabilities of Vantage 9 enable IT teams to view the scope of application service problems in terms of affected applications, locations, transactions and users--as well as the duration and frequency of problems--so that they can be prioritized according to their potential impact on the business. New summary views highlight performance by application and location, while detailed heat charts allow IT to identify service violations and application outages by time of day, day of week and transactions affected.

"We have used Vantage to shift our operational focus from the IT infrastructure to managing the end-user performance and availability of key business applications. We provide regular reports on these service levels to managers of the business units we support," said Tom Lindell, CIO at West Bend Mutual Insurance Company. "These key service metrics help keep our applications and operations staff closely aligned with the needs of the business. "

Integrated Performance Analysis Capabilities Lead to Systematic Problem Resolution Once IT has identified the scope and impact of a service problem, Vantage 9 provides sophisticated analysis capabilities that enable an intelligent handoff to the relevant technical specialists. These experts can maintain the business context as they access comprehensive application and infrastructure metrics to determine the underlying cause.

"It is crucial for our organization to be able to drill down from a high-level view of application service to end-to-end performance metrics that can provide the insight needed to definitively isolate and resolve application bottlenecks, " said Ken Shaffer, Director of IT Operations at Farm Bureau Financial Services. "We have had prior success with Vantage and are moving to Vantage 9 because it unites the end-user perspective with deep performance-analysis capabilities, supporting a systematic and proactive approach to application service management. "

The new analysis capabilities in Vantage 9 include:

o client-network-server time breakdown with baseline--when a service-level degradation occurs, Vantage 9 enables managers to quickly see where a poorly performing transaction has spent most of its processing time. Further, they can quickly compare these results to a baseline transaction to determine exactly where the transaction is lagging and understand what has changed to cause a problem.

o comparison views--Vantage 9's English language interpretation of performance bottlenecks enables IT staff to characterize a problem with greater accuracy.

o exception-based analysis--Vantage 9 provides patent-pending technology to dynamically measure network behavior throughout the course of a transaction. This makes it possible to capture a precise "transaction snapshot" at the time of a service level violation so that analysts can more easily solve problems by pinning down the actual cause.

"Vantage 9 not only identifies service problems but also provides deep insight into the interaction of the application with the underlying infrastructure components, allowing swift and definitive problem resolution," said John Williams, Product Line Director, Compuware. "Furthermore, the Compuware solution doesn't end with delivery of the product because our services team offers the expertise and experience to assure implementation success."

Getting Started
Compuware provides best practices and implementation services that can help organizations get results from end-user monitoring with integrated performance analysis in less than thirty days. Vantage 9 is available immediately. For more information on Vantage, please visit http:// compuware.com/vantage.com.

Compuware Corporation
Compuware Corporation, a leading provider of software and technology services, delivers industrial-strength solutions for the enterprise computing environment that dramatically improve productivity, quality and performance across the application life cycle. For more information about Compuware, please visit www.compuware.com.

For Sales or Marketing Information
Compuware Corporation, One Campus Martius, Detroit, MI, 48226, 800-521-9353, www.compuware.com

Compuware is a registered trademark of Compuware Corporation. All other product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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