Compuware acquire Proxima Technology
Compuware announced yesterday that it has acquired Proxima Technology.
Proxima is the maker of Proxima Centauri, a Service Level Management tool with interesting capabilities, specially in the way they aggregate key performance indicators into business service metrics.
Proxima has also a unique way to combine Six Sigma methodology and ITIL, to, for example, normalize the events generated by the monitoring of KPIs into Defects Per Millions of Opportunities, rolling them up into service metrics as Sigma numbers.
I don't know how Compuware is going to use this technology, but one issue with the Proxima approach is that the service impact relationships, defining how IT components are contributing to a service, is defined within Centauri, using rules instead of model relationships .
Without a tight integration with a CMDB, SLM/BSM tools are required to duplicate the CMDB items and relationships, sometimes using two different models, providing a weak synchronization.
As a comparison, BMC Service Impact Manager is using the BMC Atrium CMDB as the model repository, adding service impact relationships on top of the exiting items, making sure that there is a tight synchronization between assets and business services. And since Compuware does not have a real CMDB, or a discovery solution (they use the Collation/IBM solution), it's unlikely that they will be able to provide this level of integration.
Technorati Tags: BSM, Business Service Management, ITIL, M&A, SLM