Privileged User Monitoring
IT Security Seminar, 22 March, London, UK

A Practical Approach to SAM
Dorana: A Helping Hand to Compliance

z/OS Disk Subsystem Performance class
Architecture and Performance

Software (Europe) Ltd
Nibley House
Low Moor Road,
Doddington Road
Lincoln
LN6 3JY

Tel: 01522 881300
Fax: 01522 881355

Website: www.software-europe.co.uk

We have just concluded a hardworking but rewarding week for our annual user groups in an excellent hotel in Whittlebury. I wish to express my thanks to all the users and my suppliers who attended, you made it work and I have already received comments from users, saying that it was great to hear what the other users are doing.

Our User Group was split into separate streams for the four major product areas and the hotel offered plenty of opportunities for one-to-one breakout sessions. I felt the evening with Gordon Banks and our own Laura singing worked very well - although I think those who did the Can-Can need to practice!

Expense Management: The expenses group is growing strongly and the various presentations on VAT and Tax uncovered areas where most can make savings. The wish list discussion was very productive, providing our development team with a good list of ideas that may enhance the products functionality. These points will be reviewed and implemented as appropriate in time for the next release.

Asset Management: The Asset Management group wants to see a sharing of data by our two asset management solutions, Dorana and Framework. We are pleased to say that this is something already in the pipeline. This group also saw a demonstration of Ubiquity's forthcoming Windows version of Dorana which can analyse all products installed on Windows and its associated usage.

Model 204 Development: The Model 204 Development group saw the addition of a new debugger from Sirius, which looks very interesting.

IT Security Management: The security group had some interesting user presentations and our presentation of IntellinX (the exciting new security product I mentioned in the last issue of Mainframe News) was very well received by the audience.

The User Group took a lot of preparation but we have also worked hard on bringing all our products to your attention and now have an active seminar program in place running throughout the year and around the UK. The seminars for the first quarter are:

Seminar Title: Are you in full control of your T&E budget?
Product: Effective Expense Management
2006 Dates: 16 February, Lincoln. 22 March, London

Seminar Title: Making Contract Savings & Enforcing Compliance
Product: Automated Contract Management
2006 Dates: 16 February, Lincoln

Seminar Title: Privileged User Monitoring and IT Security Compliance
Product: InSight Security Manager
2006 Dates: 22 March, London

In other news, we have slightly restructured or support team, with a view to maintaining our high standard of service in to the future. Darren Newton, who has been with Software Europe for 7 years, has now been appointed as our Technical Manager.

Peter Burlow
MD, Software (Europe) Ltd

Software Asset Management (SAM) information is a crucial element of any initiative as it is key in assisting Asset Mangers when entering contract negotiations, datacentre or server consolidations, server upgrades, acquisitions, mergers, divestitures, in/outsourcing and operational planning projects, such as product replacement, with a high level of efficiency.

It is paramount that organisations know what software is installed and where and how it's being used. Without this information organisations are more than likely to be paying for narrowly used, unused, or obsolete software and possibly unnecessary upgrade and software maintenance fees.

Global indications highlight that corporations are tightening budgets, with IT asset spend decisions to be based on more detailed financial analysis, with possible exposure to high risk kept to a minimum. Although nothing new, it does herald the advent of a more diligent approach concerning the acquisition and funding of software required to meet business demands.

This realisation has also been emphasised by the introduction of legislation in the United States , in the form of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the Health Information Privacy and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the Gramm-Leach-Billey Act (GLBA). These bills are driving the acceptance of SAM as a business discipline, affecting corporate governance, disclosure, and financial accounting.

Our software asset management solution, Dorana, provides a helping hand to legislative compliance:

• Providing ongoing compliance and savings
• Helping avoid noncompliance due to an acquisition, merger, or divestiture
• Highlighting compliance issues proactively ensuring that products are only installed on licenced equipment and used as specified in the terms and conditions
• Improving negotiation strength and the subsequent effect on IT costs
• Reconciling vendor licences against inventory data and ensuring compliance
• Reducing potential possible legal or financial risk

Dorana also automatically investigates the software installed on IBM mainframes, some UNIX machines and Windows Platforms, identifies the names of the products running and reports on the usage of each.

TOP

We would like to draw your attention to  IntelliMagic's upcoming "I/O Subsystem Architecture and Performance Analysis for z/OS" class, to be held March 6 – 9, 2006 in the Hague , the Netherlands . The target audience is the storage performance, storage capacity planning, and storage architecture professional in the z/OS environment.  The class is of interest to new and advanced professionals alike.

Advances in recent years in the I/O architecture on zSeries bring new challenges to managing I/O performance.  There is a need to provide a new impulse to the traditional expertise in monitoring and debugging disk subsystem performance, and understanding I/O is more important than ever.  For instance, with the introduction of FICON, connect time takes on a completely new meaning.

This class will provide you with a thorough and up-to-date understanding of storage performance issues, showing you how to configure your Disk Subsystems to best exploit their capabilities.  Discussions will include the pro's and con's of the different RAID implementations, the feasibility of large capacity DDMs, and we will review the copy services implementations from IBM, EMC and HDS to help you plan for and monitor your copy services workloads.

The class will be led by Dr. Gilbert Houtekamer, co-author (with Dr. Pat Artis) of the book "MVS I/O Subsystems" and co-founder of IntelliMagic, and Dries de Jong, previously a member of the IBM GDPS development team and a copy services and storage expert.

Software Europe are pleased to announce the release of Intellimagic’s DISK Magic which provides a wealth of information on IBM’s Disk Systems performance. This is Intellimagic’s second product to be launched by Software Europe in the UK.

DISK Magic's sister product, RMF Magic, also provides a wealth of knowledge on your IO’s subsystem performance. As IO is a major bottleneck in every organisation these two tools are essential elements of ensuring you get maximum throughput on your machines.