SAP Extends Relationship With CA Around Introscope

SAP plans to significantly increase its own use of CA’s Introscope application performance management software as well as its customers’ access to the technology through an expanded relationship with the systems management and security vendor.

The companies announced the first phase of that extended agreement Monday.

Users of SAP’s Solution Manager 4.0 software will now be able to view the same Introscope monitoring metrics already used by SAP’s Active Global Support staff to help remotely diagnose performance and availability issues with their NetWeaver-based applications. NetWeaver is SAP’s integration platform and lies at the center of SAP’s newer mySAP ERP applications.

SAP customers will receive an SAP-specific license so that they can access read-only Introscope features tailored for SAP dashboards within Solution Manager. Customers who would like to customize or add in additional Introscope functionality to manage other non-SAP applications can license those capabilities directly from CA’s Wily Technology division.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity for us,” said Paul Melmon, vice president of CA’s Wily. “Every single customer who goes live with NetWeaver has our solution with it.”

SAP first began licensing Introscope in January 2005 for use by its own engineers to both handle customers’ application performance management issues and troubleshoot the vendor’s internal deployments such as its corporate portal.

CA acquired Introscope when it bought Wily Technology for US$375 million in cash earlier this year. Since the purchase, most of Wily’s 260-strong staff joined CA including its executive management team, Melmon said. CA is running Wily as a separate business unit and has committed to keeping in place the vendor’s strong relationships with not only SAP, but also BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. Melmon didn’t have any information regarding the future of the other, non-SAP agreements.

Introscope supports Microsoft’s .Net and Sun Microsystems’ Java.

In addition to reconfiguring Introscope for use with SAP NetWeaver-based applications, SAP and CA have been working on a tailored version of the management software for Duet, said Marc Thier, vice president of technology support at SAP.

Formerly known as Project Mendocino, Duet is software jointly developed by Microsoft and SAP to enable users to access data and processes from SAP’s back-end business applications via Microsoft’s front-end desktop Office software suite.

“We will expand the use of Wily for the performance management of all our non-ABAP products,” Thier said. ABAP, or advanced business application programming, is SAP’s proprietary programming language, and is what the vendor’s older products like its R/3 ERP applications are written in.

At present, SAP has ABAP performance management data from R/3 and non-ABAP, Java-based performance management data from mySAP applications sitting “side by side” in customers’ IT systems, Their said. Come December, SAP hopes to integrate the two kinds of management data into a single user interface using its business intelligence module within Solution Manager to have “end-to-end dashboards,” he added.

As for how SAP might work with CA as a whole in future, Thier said, “We’re very much at the beginning of a relationship with CA. We’ve nothing to announce at this time.”

-China Martens, IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)

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