SEA Now Selling Centerity Systems Management Tool

May 22, 2012 Alex Woodie

Software Engineering of America was one of 75 vendors demonstrating their wares at the recent COMMON conference at Disneyland. And while SEA is a regular at COMMON, this was the first time the company was talking about Centerity, a new systems management tool that it’s selling into its IBM i and mainframe customer bases.

Centerity is a monitoring and management solution designed to provide IT departments with a real-time view into the health and availability of their applications and business services. SEA says the product offers comparable functionality to established enterprise management tools, but with less cost and complexity.

The tool features hundreds of templates for monitoring various servers, desktops, networks, databases, applications, and security logs. It can also monitor “passive” equipment such as IP-connected cameras, UPS, and storage. Data is gathered using a combination of pre-built agents for applications like MS Exchange, Oracle 11g, and firewalls, and also via agent-less approaches, i.e. SNMP. The IBM i server is supported, and users can also write their own templates.

The Centerity console gives users real-time views into the state of IT operations. For example, the Centerity dashboard provides a speedometer-like view of how specific functions, such as CRM, printing, ERP, network bandwidth, and phone orders, are currently running.

When applications behave badly, the software generates alerts to notify administrators, and can also be configured to automatically respond to certain problems. The product also offers deep application inspection to track down problems in specific applications. It generates reports for service level agreements (SLAs) and other requirements.

Two versions of Centerity are being sold by SEA. The standard edition, which starts at $35,000, includes the functionality described above, with support for up to 200 devices. The enterprise edition, which costs more, gives customers the capability to monitor their IT assets across the globe from a single console. It also provides greater scalability (support for up to 40,000 devices) and support for clustering and virtualization.

SEA partnered with the Israeli company Centerity to obtain distribution rights to the Centerity systems management and monitoring tool. Centerity first rolled out its software about six years ago.