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SCMP Reporter

Asia-Pacific is close to outpacing the United States' demand for network performance management software as organisations in the region heed alarm bells over breakdowns in their Internet infrastructure.

Concord Communications believes this sharpened focus on Asian networks offers a bright spot in what has been a slow year for software sales worldwide.

'There is a phenomenal opportunity in Asia for software that provides integrated management across systems, applications and networks,' said Darren Adams, Concord's managing director for Asia-Pacific and Japan.

Asia already was beginning to become crowded, with the likes of Hewlett-Packard, BMC, Lucent Technologies, InfoVista, Computer Associates, Tivoli Systems and Micromuse competing in different segments of the network performance management software market against Concord, analysts said.

Mr Adams said Concord first tested its new eHealth version 5.0 in Asia and formally launched the product this week because the region wanted better preventive medicine against network problems.

'This is the first product of its kind that is capable of providing fault, performance and availability management reporting and analysis for the entire Internet infrastructure,' he said.

'We expect a significant demand and our revenues in the Asia-Pacific to double in three years as growth from the region outpaces the US, which has traditionally been Concord's largest market.'

By visualising information-technology infrastructure from a business perspective, eHealth 5.0 allows IT staff to focus on the business processes that make their companies run, rather than the software that manages the IT infrastructure.

The product also provides a Web display showing the performance of all infrastructure technology devices and services that affect business activities.

'Comprehensive infrastructure management has become indispensable to delivering on business promises,' said Dennis Drogseth, vice-president of industry analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates.

'What has been missing to date is one platform that provides IT staff both fault and performance management information. So these staffs have had only an incomplete view of how their infrastructure is running.

'Concord's eHealth gives them one view of real-time faults and historical performance trends, so they can identify and fix all of the problems that affect the infrastructure's health.'

Before the launch of eHealth 5.0, companies usually operated fault management and performance management as separate systems with limited interaction. This approach provided only a fragmented view of infrastructure health and prevented IT managers from quickly identifying the serious problems. Wrong guesses often caused unnecessary shutdown.

'Our product takes the mystery out of IT management by being the first application to seamlessly meld its real-time fault management application and its proven performance management and analysis,' Mr Adams said.

'This single solution allows IT managers to set intelligent thresholds that only signal critical alarms which affect overall performance and weed out minor issues.'

Research firm International Data Corp said Concord's eHealth suite enabled the company 'to play a central role in the evolution of service-level management from buzzword to service differentiator'.

According to research firm Gartner's Dataquest unit, economic restraint has led many organisations to put discretionary spending on hold, causing worldwide spending on new software to grow just 6 per cent in the first half of this year.

It said, however, that software vendors might see an increase in spending and market hype in segments such as security, network systems management and collaborative applications.

That meant more business opportunities for Concord, Mr Adams said.

'We know the service-provider and telecommunications markets better than any of our competitors. All of the top 20 telecoms companies worldwide are Concord customers,' he said.

'They turn to Concord because we are able to provide solutions that help them troubleshoot potential problems, introduce new services, increase revenue and keep their customers happy.'

Concord's customers in Asia include Pacific Century CyberWorks, Telstra, Singapore Telecom, Telekom Malaysia, NTT DoCoMo and Chung Hwa Telecom.

The company expects to expand its regional staff from 18 to 24 this year in its offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo.



Region sharpens focus on infrastructure breakdowns