Cendura Introduces IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Solution That Delivers Control and Visibility to Information Technology Organizations

Market Wire, September, 2004

Cendura, a leader in continuous IT control solutions for enterprises, (www.cendura.com), today announced at the IT Service Management Forum in Long Beach, CA, the release of a solution that allows IT organizations implementing ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) or COBIT processes to measure and inspect the effectiveness of the services delivered. Built on the Cohesion platform, the solution is called "Continuous Improvement," and allows IT to automatically detect and actively make changes to discover, compare and verify application environments, audit them for policy compliance and provide overarching service management across the enterprise infrastructure.

"The Global 2000 today are becoming increasingly focused on such frameworks as ITIL as a means to implement much needed IT control as well as gain visibility into business processes management," said William P. Hurley, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Solutions, such as Cendura's, that offer an advanced Configuration Management Database (CMDB), a centralized repository of suggested and customizable best practices, and a database that records pertinent business service data provide companies with an immediate head start in meeting ITIL initiatives."

"With Cohesion, IT organizations can take process improvement to the next level," said Rick McEachern, Chief Marketing Officer, Cendura. "From a central vantage point, IT management can detect changes, make corrections, define new policies, and audit the results of IT activities to create a feedback loop for continual process improvement. The breadth and depth of information available in the Cohesion CMDB provides visibility and control across the application infrastructure to ensure that standardized processes and best practices are being applied."

Cohesion complements the ITIL framework in the following ways:

Gain Control of IT Assets: Cohesion's Progressive Auto Discovery feature automatically discovers configuration items and relationships. This provides error-free collection of configuration item attributes and ensures accurate CMDB data.

Accurate, Error-free Audits: Cohesion's discovery capability combined with its Intelligent Rules Engine and verification, comparison, and reporting capabilities allows for complete and error-free auditing against corporate policies and best-practices standards. Cohesion audits are completely accurate for every component accessible from the Cohesion Server -- and can be done for a complete data center in minutes.

Support for Quality IT Service Delivery:

Reduce Service Errors: Integrating Cohesion in the standard IT processes from development through deployment can eliminate service errors attributable to improper configurations.

Improve Speed of Repair and Recovery: Whether in the operational data center or in the context of Service Contingency Management, Cohesion can do an automated audit to support diagnosis of problems and to assure that applications and systems are configured properly before being put into service.

Improve Customer Satisfaction: Through automated policies and audits, IT can proactively monitor components for unauthorized configuration changes, which could lead to service problems.

Support for ITSM (IT Service Management) processes:

Improved Change Management: IT can use Cohesion's Change Detection Engine and Active Change Management Engine to improve Change Management process, assuring that accurate configuration information is available for both the change approval process and the change implementation process.

Accelerated Incident Resolution Time: Cohesion provides a unified cross-platform user interface for navigating and analyzing configuration and change information. Verification against standards, change detection from previously working configurations, and comparisons between testing and production environments can be done at interactive speed.

More Accurate Risk Analysis: Cohesion's depth of configuration information assures that risk analysis audits for security management and regulatory compliance can be based on complete and accurate information. Corporate security standards can be set in Cohesion blueprints to allow daily automated auditing.

The foundation of Cohesion is a platform that includes a Service Management Database (SMDB), consisting of an advanced Configuration Management Database (CMDB) providing a centralized repository where configuration changes down to the element-level can be viewed and tracked; a Best Practices Database, consisting of over 4,000 vendor-recommended and industry best practices rules; and a Business Services Database, which collects information needed to run IT as a business -- departments, business processes, owners, and locations.

For companies who want to learn more about the Cohesion solution for ITIL, Sheldon Borkin, Ph.D. and Vice President, Strategic Accounts for Cendura, will be a featured speaker in the panel, "Which Came First: The Tool or the Process?" at IT Service Management Forum September 27 - 29, 2004. Cendura will demonstrate Cohesion at booth number 229.