ServiceMesh's Agility Platform Brings Enterprise-Proven Cloud Governance and Lifecycle Management to the Next Level

SANTA MONICA, CA--(Marketwire - May 10, 2011) - ServiceMesh, a provider of enterprise software and services that enable Agile IT operating models for Global 2000 clients, today unveiled version 7.2 of its Agility Platform. With this product release, ServiceMesh extends its leadership position with the industry's only enterprise cloud governance and lifecycle management platform which now includes a powerful drag-and-drop visual policy modeler, advanced reporting engine, and a range of expanded security and asset management capabilities. These new features, combined with the platform's workload portability across heterogeneous clouds and comprehensive policy-based governance capabilities, are critically important for successful enterprise cloud adoption by providing robust governance and management controls that can be enforced across the enterprise. The resulting benefits include significantly reduced risk, costs, complexity, cycle times, and capital spending associated with IT operations, infrastructure, and platforms.

Industry leaders in financial services and other Global 2000 firms have relied on ServiceMesh to transform the way their IT organizations acquire and deliver IT services to the business. This includes leveraging the Agility Platform to manage and govern multiple pools of internal and external "as-a-service" offerings, so that IT can be more responsive and demand-driven, and to allow internal IT resources to focus on more innovative, high value activities. The Agility Platform uniquely addresses enterprise requirements for a unified governance and lifecycle management layer that can optimize workload placement across multiple, disparate internal and external cloud environments while ensuring transparency, security, and portability.

Enterprises that undertake cloud computing initiatives without an extensible and auditable policy-based governance system risk exposure to security compromises, service failures, inadequate performance, violated service level agreements, and costly legal and regulatory penalties. Additionally, a lack of cloud portability and end-to-end workflow automation can compromise key benefits such as vendor contestability and lock-in avoidance, time-to-market improvements, workload placement and performance optimization, and operating cost reductions.

Unlike other offerings available today, the ServiceMesh Agility Platform provides a holistic solution that addresses broad aspects of an organization's IT operating model to achieve strategic benefits. Agility Platform capabilities span the end-to-end lifecycle, encompassing application migration planning, assembly of fully portable and policy-compliant cloud workloads, automated deployment and run-time management, self-service access to services, and comprehensive cloud security capabilities that include federated identity management.

KEY AGILITY PLATFORM BENEFITS

• Improve IT responsiveness to business needs: Agility Platform automates the plan, build, share and run lifecycle for cloud services to dramatically compress implementation cycle times. Agility Platform is a highly versatile platform to enable an "everything-as-a-service" operating model consisting of customizable IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS offerings. This includes a central repository of IT services with fully governed self-service access, customizable workflows, end-to-end automation, and the portability to move workloads between clouds as desired to meet business needs.

• Mitigate risk and manage service quality: Agility Platform establishes and enforces policy-driven governance across all stakeholders, resources, and deployment environments, ensuring that each workload is placed into the appropriate cloud based on policy and governance restrictions established by the enterprise. Agility Platform also implements comprehensive security at the network, instance, data, and access levels, including policy-driven zoned security models and virtual firewall management. This results in cloud deployments that are often more secure than many organization's current on premise deployments.

• Lower Costs: Agility Platform provides lifecycle management and automation to improve efficiency and lower costs that extends far beyond simply starting, stopping, and restarting instances in the cloud. Lifecycle management begins with generation of Cloud Readiness™ and Cloud Value™ scores to profile and prioritize candidate workloads with the greatest economic benefit, and aligns them to available cloud environments that best fit their needs. This extends further to automated workflow approvals, policy creation and enforcement, self-service access with on-demand provisioning, and fine-grain visibility into consumption and cost/chargeback information to proactively manage buying behavior and minimize operating costs.

Agility Platform 7.2 includes several new product innovations and capabilities as a result of close collaboration with enterprise customers. Key version 7.2 highlights include:

• Industry's first drag-and-drop visual policy editor. It's now easier to leverage the power of Agility Platform's policy management capabilities with a new visual drag-and-drop palette to create, manage, and enforce business level policies. The new editor can be used by IT Analysts and other roles that lack programming knowledge, thus extending policy management to broader stakeholders across the lifecycle while maintaining access rights and enforcement controls. More sophisticated users can toggle between synchronized graphical and XML policy views to customize policies as desired. The new editor makes it faster and easier to create complex business-level policies, and quickly enforces them on a wide range of environments, projects, groups, and other entities.

• Highly scalable reporting engine with fine grain drill-down/roll-up capabilities. The new reporting engine greatly improves transparency with role-based access to custom reports that can be quickly aggregated or drilled-down across clouds, organizations, projects, topologies, instances, and more. Reports can be accessed from a new user interface or via a comprehensive API for integration with accounting/billing systems and third-party dashboards. A new reporting architecture dramatically reduces network bandwidth usage and improves scalability by using federated reporting repositories to avoid continuous data streaming to a central location, significantly reducing network bandwidth expense.

• Expanded security, networking, and asset management capabilities. Version 7.2 applies zoned security policies directly to host-based and virtual firewalls to reduce human errors and further automate deployment. Agility Platform also includes new extensions and support for federated identity management and continuous integration capabilities. Also included in this release are improved virtual DHCP and IP management features, and expanded versioning, auditing, and snapshot capabilities.

QUOTES AND MULTIMEDIA:

"Enterprise customers may be able to obtain significant economic, performance, and scalability advantages if they are able to deploy workloads to different heterogeneous cloud environments. IT organizations wishing to become a true "IT broker" to their clients should look for tools that can provide a comprehensive management approach for this emerging environment to reduce risk and improve operational agility."
- Cameron Haight, Research Vice President, Gartner

"ServiceMesh has implemented Agile IT operating models with some of the most demanding enterprises in the world. ServiceMesh's Agility Platform 7.2 embodies everything we have learned about enterprise IT needs, and provides a cornerstone for broader enterprise cloud adoption. This includes the Agility Platform's unified approach to governing, managing and optimizing workload placement across a wide range of cloud environments, which is instrumental in lowering IT operating costs, reducing capital spending, and adapting more quickly to changing business needs."
- Dave Roberts, vice president of strategy, ServiceMesh

Learn more about the ServiceMesh Agility Platform.

Request a live demonstration of the Agility Platform in action.

View pre-recorded demos of the Agility Platform capabilities.

Learn and take part in Agile IT operating model conversations on the ServiceMesh blog.

About ServiceMesh

ServiceMesh delivers enterprise-grade solutions to enable Agile IT operating models for Global 2000 clients. ServiceMesh solutions consist of advisory services, market-ready IT optimization strategies, and the ServiceMesh Agility Platform™ to automate and manage the lifecycle of cloud-based, "everything-as-a-service" environments.

Enterprise customers select ServiceMesh to design and implement IT strategies that offer game changing competitive advantages through a federation of internal and external IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and cloud service providers. Customers use the Agility Platform to automate their plan, build, share, and run lifecycle with the security, governance, transparency, identity management, and policy control required by large enterprises. Some of the world's largest and most sophisticated companies in financial services, health care, and other IT-intensive industries rely on ServiceMesh to realize quantum improvements in business agility, lower operating costs, and to enable new business and economic models that support their strategic business initiatives. To learn more, visit www.servicemesh.com.