Unicenter: The Next Dimension

On March 22, Computer Associates (CA) announced the general availability of the first beta of Unicenter TND (The Next Dimension), the latest version of Unicenter TNG (The Next Generation), the company's flagship enterprise management software framework. To receive the software, you must register online by clicking the Who can I contact for more information? button. Upon registration at the site, CA will mail that beta to interested parties. Unicenter TND is built on the Jasmine ii infrastructure, using it as a black-box database. The solution runs on Windows 2000 and Windows NT, and various flavors of UNIX. At the moment, the product installs on Linux, HP-UX, IBM AIX, and Sun Microsystems Solaris. Add-on packages will let Unicenter TND manage many network functions for more than 20 flavors of UNIX, NetWare, and many other OSs. One of Unicenter TND’s major add-ins is a network software deployment package.According to Allan Anderson, VP of Business Management for CA, Unicenter TND has four main project goals: “to add a time element to analyzing the condition of your network, to add intelligence to the monitoring through CA’s Neugent technology, to add visualization through the use of a browser-based management portal, and to improve the product's overall management capabilities.”The most significant addition is the time element, for which Unicenter TND is named. Using a VCR-style interface, a jog dial lets you monitor the network over time—reviewing the past and extrapolating to the future. The system monitors more than 2000 data points (e.g., logs, CPU usage, disk capacity), puts the data into data clusters, and associates the patterns of these clusters with important network conditions. CA calls this matching process Adaptive Pattern Recognition. According to the Unicenter TND press release, “From this knowledge base, Neugents can alter the future by identifying the root cause of an event, and then reporting, prioritizing and correcting issues based on their business impact. Neugent information is presented in an interface that enables 'time travel' through the entire eBusiness environment.”Unicenter TND also includes a Quality of Service (QoS) module that monitors, reports, and controls the available bandwidth an application has and prioritizes network traffic by type. Administrators can monitor service level agreements (SLAs) among IT, the business organization, and customers and monitor ISP and application service provider (ASP) service levels.The software's Enterprise Management Portal provides an integrated view of all aspects of management, regardless of discipline or location. Users can personalize this Web-based portal to get all the information or only the information they require.Unicenter TNG is CA's flagship product and the largest dollar volume product in the company's portfolio. Before CA acquired Platinum, this $2 billion product represented about one-half of CA’s revenue. Today, Unicenter TNG represents about one-third of CA revenue. In the enterprise management software space, Unicenter TNG controls more than half of the overall revenue.