OpTier announced that its CoreFirst software is extending transaction visibility to virtual environments to help IT meet changing business needs. CoreFirst provides organizations with the insight and stability required to manage mission-critical applications running in production within virtualized environments.

According to a November 2007 IDC white paper titled “Business Transaction Management: Facilitating the Management of Virtual Environments,” BTM software like CoreFirst will be a key factor in the successful deployment of new computing platforms based on virtualization.

As organizations turn to virtualization technology to manage and consolidate their IT resources, visibility into the datacenter is obscured. OpTier’s CoreFirst BTM technology provides organizations with visibility and control over their business transactions in virtualized and non-virtualized environments. Working in conjunction with virtualization solutions from partners such as DataSynapse and Sun Microsystems, CoreFirst can be used by companies to add transaction visibility across the many complex layers of disparate production systems and applications created by virtualization.

“While virtualization is a valuable tool for maximizing the efficiency of IT resources, the layer of abstraction it introduces can make it difficult to ensure that service delivery requirements are met,” said Dan Yachin, research director at IDC EMEA Emerging Technologies. “The visibility that OpTier’s BTM software provides can help address this challenge by assuring IT managers that all applications are running smoothly and that business-critical applications are receiving the resources they need to run properly.”

CoreFirst provides several capabilities within virtual environments including:

• Cost and performance improvements
• Enhanced user experience
• Better flexibility as business needs change

“The functionality that CoreFirst offers represents a missing link that many of our customers have been looking for to make their virtualization efforts more successful,” said Vijay Sarathy, senior director of marketing for Sun xVM, Sun Microsystems. “By combining CoreFirst with Sun’s virtualization technology, IT organizations can quickly and more confidently shift resources within their virtualized datacenter to meet the changing needs of business.”

“As IT continues to consolidate and centralize, the level of complexity within IT soars. Our Fortune 500 customers have recognized the value of using CoreFirst’s BTM capabilities within virtual environments just as they have used it to gain visibility into the disparate silos created by their SOA initiatives,” said Israel Mazin, CEO and chairman of the board at OpTier. “With multiple applications from multiple business units all competing for resources, the ability to track transactions through the many layers of a virtual datacenter is a strategic advantage that helps companies to better align IT with business goals. We will continue to work with our partners to explore new opportunities to meet the needs of our customers working on consolidation and virtualization projects.”