Compuware bets its life on application performance
May 13, 2009 —
It took about four or five months of conversations with Micro Focus for Compuware to complete the divestiture of its testing and QA product line last week. The decision to reposition the company began earlier than that.
“About a year ago, we started the transformation of the business to see where we could be the best in the world,” said Bob Paul, COO and president of Compuware, in an interview with SD Times. “We looked at our assets, and where we saw growth, and what our footprint was in those markets.”
The company has been making organizational and operational changes since last May, Paul said, and along with figuring out what the company was going to do, it had to be clear about what it wasn’t going to do. “Quality and testing wasn’t a focus point for us,” he explained. “We had so many disparate applications that were far too expensive to maintain. That took resources away from where we see our opportunities.”
The result of this internal examination was the company’s decision to “double down” on end-to-end application performance, especially from the perspective of the application’s user, Paul said, acknowledging the company will use the US$80 million proceeds from the sale to make strategic acquisitions in the area of application performance.
Using the example of a bank with ATMs and customers using Web-based applications all over the world, Paul said a geographical representation of those ATMs and users can be seen on a dashboard, which can then be drilled down into the network, server or client level to determine the cause of any performance issues. The software can access the problem and then offer up proactive suggestions to fix the issue, Paul said.
Somewhat surprisingly, Compuware did not sell any of its mainframe software to Micro Focus, a company that does mainframe application modernization. “That was never on the table,” Paul said. “Our mainframe customers are critically important to us. That gives us a springboard to converse about application performance.” Compuware’s Strobe software “drives the same performance monitoring data into the same dashboard,” Paul explained.
Cloud computing, virtualization, service-oriented architectures and mobile deployments all strain the performance of applications, Paul said. Compuware’s Vantage product line addresses application performance relative to the infrastructure it runs on. Further, he said, the company’s Covisint collaboration portal subsidiary gives Compuware a future path to deploying application performance software as a service. Paul called Covisint “a pure cloud computing solution” that can be leveraged going forward.
Paul described the areas of IT portfolio management and project portfolio management as other areas of potential growth, estimating the market value at $40 million. Compuware plays in that yard with its Changepoint product line, which provides an integrated view into IT operations.
Related Search Term(s): Compuware, Micro Focus
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