NEW YORK, March 10 /PRNewswire/ --

- Company's Business Transaction Management Software is the First Solution to Provide IT with True Business Visibility into Virtualized Environments

OpTier(TM), the leader in Business Transaction Management (BTM), today announced that its CoreFirst software is the first product to extend transaction visibility to virtual environments to help IT meet dynamically 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 increasingly turn to virtualization technology to more economically manage and consolidate their IT resources, visibility into the datacenter is obscured. OpTier's CoreFirst BTM technology -- which is deployed in some of the largest companies in the world -- 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 unique capabilities within virtual environments including: -- Cost and performance improvements -- CoreFirst can help organizations to further capitalize on the cost and performance benefits of a virtual environment by allowing them to understand the relationship between the configuration of their virtual environment and the service levels such configurations provide for transactions flowing through the environment. -- Enhanced user experience -- Application contention is a big challenge within virtualized environments because applications hosted on the same system are forced to compete for the same resources. As a result, business critical transactions can be compromised when one application consumes more resources. With CoreFirst, organizations can monitor critical business transactions to identify, isolate and resolve these contention issues as they occur and before users are negatively affected. -- Better flexibility as business needs change -- Because virtualization allows transactions to traverse over multiple servers for improved utilization, it becomes challenging for IT to understand where within the datacenter business transactions are being executed at a given moment. CoreFirst's granular, cross-tier visibility helps managers gain insight into IT transactions so they can accurately meet service level goals and better align IT with business priorities.

"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."

About OpTier

OpTier(TM) provides software solutions that dynamically link business services to underlying IT infrastructure, assuring service delivery and optimizing IT resources. Its unique Business Transaction Management(TM) technology -- which delivers end-to-end visibility and control of all business transactions -- makes effective Business Service Management a reality. OpTier tracks and monitors all business transactions -- across all tiers, all the time. It identifies and isolates performance problems as they develop, thus minimizing the cost to resolve them. OpTier generates intelligence, for more effective testing, capacity planning, provisioning and decision-making. It can further prioritize transaction resource allocation based on business needs. For more information, visit http://www.optier.com.

OpTier, CoreFirst and "Putting First Things First" are trademarks of OpTier.

Sun and Sun Microsystems are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

Contacts: Lindsay Diamond Avi Dines or Jennifer Barlow OpTier Schwartz Communications, Inc. +1-212-679-2700 +1-781-684-0770 lindsay.diamond@optier.com OpTier@schwartz-pr.com

Lindsay Diamond of OpTier, +1-212-679-2700, lindsay.diamond@optier.com; or Avi Dines or Jennifer Barlow of Schwartz Communications, Inc. for OpTier, +1-781-684-0770, OpTier@schwartz-pr.com