With two of the UK's biggest banks forced to sell off major sections of their business, the face of retail banking in the UK is set to undergo a major facelift, writes Colin Rowland, senior VP EMEA operations at financial services technology firm OpTier.
OpTier, a U.S.-Israeli maker of business software, is seeking to expand through acquisitions and plans to help fill its war chest by going public on Nasdaq next year, its top executive said.
70 percent of UK shoppers plan to spend more than 200 pounds online in the run up to Christmas, but only if the sites work
Around one buyer out of six prefer to go off line shopping because of slow loading website service as claimed by OpTier.
Research commissioned by IT service management specialist Optier has provided insight into what consumers are looking for from their Christmas online shopping experience.
More than one in six web users claim a slow loading website puts them off online shopping, says OpTier.
Amazon and John Lewis get excited about what could be the biggest online Christmas shopping period to date.
Application performance is immaterial if the end-user is not experiencing the correct level of service. Therefore, to deliver truly exceptional application performance, that is optimised and consistent, IT managers need the ability to monitor applications all the way to the end-users machine says Colin Rowland from OpTier.
Return on investment - ROI - used to be a simple way of measuring how soon new IT would start to pay for itself; now it’s become a headline metric for contract negotiations. But has its value been squeezed too far?
Motti Tal of OpTier discusses end user monitoring in the context of how/why application performance can't be maximized in the dark.
Servers & Other Hardware Are Prime Targets For Budget Dollars As The Economy Bounces Back
Cisco-backed OpTier Inc, which specialises in business transaction monitoring tools, has added an end-user experience assessment line to its product portfolio which will provide IT shops with visibility into how application availability and response times impact on network users.
IT monitoring software maker OpTier has come out with a new product that helps firms monitor how well their web sites and applications work from the perspective of customers such as traders.
Google’s primary focus on streamlining the flow between the browser and the web server may serve the needs for many consumer web applications, but ignores the needs of businesses that are working to improve the performance of their transaction flows end to end.
OpTier Experience Manager provides insight into how well application transactions perform for the end user.
An IT department was once relatively simple. A server, a few computers, perhaps some firewalls, internet connection and a help desk. Staff came to work to write documents, make phone calls and not much more.
Service-oriented architecture - SOA - is designed to bring cost efficiencies to IT projects, but the economic downturn may have caused many SOA-led IT projects to be shelved; however, like the Monty Python parrot, SOA’s not dead, it’s just resting, says E&T.
Firms like OpTier have developed new versions of monitoring software that can navigate complex applications to track transactions from end user to execution, seeking and destroying bottlenecks, prioritizing and clearing traffic for "important" transactions, rightsizing staff deployments and reducing server and energy use.
Don't let buying the latest technology become a management nightmare, says OpTier's Colin Rowland.
Deutsche Bank has selected OpTier's CoreFirst business transaction management software to keep track of the performance of more than 20 applications in its retail banking and trading divisions worldwide.
OpTier, which develops information system management tools, is supplying Deutsche Bank with an advanced system for managing business transactions.
OpTier, the leader in Business Transaction Management (BTM) for the enterprise, today announced that Deutsche Bank has selected the company's CoreFirst software to enhance visibility into its IT environment in order to reduce the costs associated with downtime and mean time to recovery (MTTR) throughout its retail banking and trading divisions.
Deutsche Bank has implemented the CoreFirst Business Transaction Management software from OpTier to reduce the costs associated with downtime and mean time to recovery throughout its retail banking and trading divisions.
Deutsche Bank has rolled out a new system to monitor and improve IT performance and service levels.
Often, power usage is monitored at a macro level, as IT managers look at the overall consumption of a data center. But in order to tweak eco-logical strategies, monitoring needs to get much more granular.
Network managers are still struggling to find problems before users do. New tools make it easy to gather performance data, but are we doomed to suffer what one vendor calls 'death by metrics?'
Complex methods of managing IT systems are costing big firms an average of £4.6 million each per year, according to a survey by software firm OpTier.
Overly complex IT management tools are costing large businesses more than £4.5million annually.
Research carried out by OpTier quizzed 2,000 UK IT decision makers and found that companies are not investing in simplifying their management tools, which may show the need for IT outsourcing.
OpTier found UK firms are making use of overly complex hosting solutions, which is reducing their efficiency.
Overly complex IT management tools are costing large UK businesses as much as £4.5m every year in downtime and staff time, according to research by business transaction management firm OpTier.
A new survey has revealed that three-quarters of UK IT managers are confused by how complex their IT management set up is, showing a need for more management training.
Overly complex IT management tools are costing large businesses more than £4.5million annually
A new survey from business transaction management (BTM) firm OpTier has revealed that three quarters of UK IT managers are baffled by the complexity of their IT management set-up.
Evidence suggests that financial firms are turning to their IT providers for help in achieving nirvana: the best trade price at the fastest speed and the lowest cost possible.
Motti Tal discusses the advantages of Business Transaction Management.
In this eWEEK podcast hosted by Mike Vizard, OpTier's executive vice president for marketing, product and business development, Motti Tal, talks about how IT organizations can leverage a new generation of business transaction management tools to break down enterprise application silos.
In this podcast hosted by Carol Roy, Motti Tal discusses OpTier, Business Transaction Management, and how/why companies determine if BTM will work for their virtualized environment.
As enterprises seek to cut costs, better utilize IT resources, and provide a more agile infrastructure, they are turning to virtualization. However virtualization has yet to be widely adopted for business-critical operations such as online banking, supply chain and client portals.
In today’s economic environment, IT must not only do more with less but find ways to do more with smaller budgets. What if IT could be managed and measured in a brand new way? To learn more about business transaction management, we spoke with Motti Tal, executive vice president of marketing, product, and business development at OpTier.
Morgan Stanley is using OpTier’s CoreFirst software to monitor performance and find bottlenecks in institutional fixed income trading.
Insurers historically raced to deploy the latest information technologies, yet they continued to rely on older, established methodologies to build the internal business applications that they installed on those leading-edge platforms. Some, such as the step-by-step Waterfall development process, are becoming living fossils in the age of cloud computing and service-oriented architectures.
Upgrades to server and data center hardware are vital for keeping an operation running efficiently, but in a belt-tightening environment, there may be fewer new machines to unwrap in the months ahead at some enterprises.
Application downtime, whether you're measuring intermittent availability or fully downed systems, is too costly to ignore. The best way to avoid trouble is to view the infrastructure through the eyes of your transactions.
As enterprises seek to cut costs, better utilize IT resources, and provide a more agile infrastructure, they are turning to virtualization. However, virtualization has yet to be widely adopted for business-critical operations such as online banking, supply chain, and client portals.
The current turmoil in the economy and the projected near and medium term downturn have immediate effects on the way we manage enterprise IT. Businesses across the globe are taking action to reduce cost and improve efficiencies. IT is taking a big hit, and the challenge of effectively managing IT with reduced headcount and budgets is growing. Uncertainty is limiting business and IT from knowing they can truly prepare for future demand, the crisis in the capital markets industry is an important example at how the current volatility was very difficult to handle business wise and a formidable challenge for IT.
In the late 1990s, functional service-level agreements were the holy grail for telecommunication service providers -- highly sought-after, but always just out of reach, as customers demanded high levels of service from their circuits and application services. Although most providers offered SLAs, few were able to monitor them correctly or in real time.
Application downtime, whether you're measuring intermittent availability or fully downed systems, is too costly to ignore. The best way to avoid trouble is to view the infrastructure through the eyes of your transactions.
Tracking application performance issues at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota's call center was a major headache until it deployed CoreFirst, transaction management software from New York-based OpTier.
Following last week's announcement from Israel- and New York-based Optier, the leader in business-transaction management, which announced that it had raised $47.5 million in funding from new investors Index Ventures and Morgan Stanley, and existing investors Pitango Venture Capital, Carmel Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Gemini Israel Funds and strategic partner Cisco, as well as secured a $15m. credit line with Plenus Venture Lending, this week's TechWatch starts out with some more capital-raising news.
OpTier, which specializes in business transaction management software, disclosed on Sept. 23 that it has secured $47.5 million in fourth-round funding, plus a $15 million credit line.
OpTier, a provider of business transaction management software, has secured $47.5 million in series D funding. The proceedings will be used to finance its plans to increase sales and make acquisitions.
Business transaction management software maker continues to attract investors: OpTier this week landed more than $63 million in new funds to augment development of its business transaction management software and promote company growth, potentially via acquisition.
Optier Inc., an Israeli start-up that is developing software to monitor transactions over computer networks, raised $62.5 million in its fourth round of funding, it announced Tuesday.
Software company OpTier said it raised an additional $47.5 million in funding from new and existing investors and secured a $15 million credit line from a lender.
OpTier has raised $116 million since it was raised in 2002. The present round will finance plans the company's plans to expand its BTM offerings through via acquisitions and organic development, and expand industry partnerships.
OpTier featured in Network World's Products of the Week for the week of September 15. Products of the Week is Network World's round-up of intriguing new products announced in the last week. OpTier is featured on slide 18.
...automation doesn't stop -- or begin -- at the database tier. IT automation encompasses everything from run book automation to server provisioning, from resource mapping to job scheduling. OpTier is mentioned as a vendor that will be seen again.
Optimal application performance is in the experience of the end user. OpTier's EVP of Marketing and Business Development Motti Tal is quoted on the second page.
OpTier is shipping a new version of its CoreFirst software this week that the company says will provide better visibility into transactions such as trade orders and new tools to meet service level agreements or promises on trade execution.
Application performance management vendor [OpTier] amps up user experience, transaction monitoring features in flagship product
OpTier, a leader in business transaction management (BTM) for the enterprise, has announced the availability of CoreFirst 3.0.
Jim Hirschauer of Wachovia speaks about how OpTier's CoreFirst helped him deal with a battery of systems-management and monitoring tools reacted too slowly.
There are innovative new approaches to tackle network monitoring, such as the technologies developed by emerging companies such as Bristol Technology and OpTier. These allow users to track each and every data transaction as it makes its way through an infrastructure.
There’s no doubt about the great potential of virtualization to cut IT hardware and management costs, and utilize IT resources even more efficiently--all-the-while providing a more agile IT infrastructure. Yet, so far, virtualization, especially for mission critical services at larger enterprises, has been more promise than reality.
Senior EMA analyst Julie Craig and OpTier's Motti Tal discuss:
CoreFirst is a business transaction management platform that allows the Enterprise to view, and then manage, business transactions from both the Business and IT perspectives; providing such information as which services were consumed, by whom, how quickly they were delivered, which components participated in the service delivery, and the effect on the overall infrastructure.
Wachovia recently told us that it’s using OpTier’s CoreFirst software to monitor and improve the response time of its foreign exchange platform. OpTier’s “active context tracking” is embedded in applications and/or middleware and identifies the end-to-end flow of every transaction. In the future OpTier plans to partner with Cisco to offer a network-based solution.
Local software companies continue to provide innovative solutions for varied applications, allowing the country to play an ever-increasing role in some of the most important projects here and worldwide.
Company's Business Transaction Management Software Provides IT with True Business Visibility into Virtualized Environments
To achieve its ultimate goal of cost savings, energy efficiencies and processing power, Wachovia planned to deploy its "datacenters in a box" design; however, after a three-and-a-half-year project to upgrade its global datacenters, the Charlotte, N.C.-headquartered bank has achieved a "pod in a box" environment.
Wachovia's investment bank had a problem: foreign exchange customers were complaining about platform performance issues. "Foreign exchange is not a good place to have performance issues -- not when you like to retain customers," notes Jim Hirschauer, architecture manager and technical expert for the corporate and investment banking technology division of Wachovia.
OpTier's CoreFirst is mentioned on the second page of this article as an important development in systems management.
Senior EMA analyst Julie Craig and OpTier's Motti Tal discuss how enterprises can:
* Avoid software related outages
* Gain complete visibility into transaction level resource consumption
* Manage shared computing environments based on real business context information
* Reduce the time to identify critical business transaction problems
Business transaction management software developer OpTier Ltd. has been named the Globes most promising start-up of the year for 2007-2008. Globes editor-in-chief Haggai Golan made the announcement at the 11th Annual Globes and Ernst & Young Israel Israel Journey Conference 2007.
Vendors step up to address the governance, quality and management technology triangle that ensures successful implementations
Tom Foremski speaks with Joost Pronk van Hoogeveen from Sun and Ronit Belson from OpTier, an ISV partner of Sun’s, about virtualization. The conversation covers five points about virtualization: Understanding your business application; How do your virtualization technologies fit your business conditions; Where should you compress your costs; Decide who owns the chargebacks; Determine your backup strategy.
Transaction management vendor OpTier and open source management software maker Hyperic separately rake in the cash.
A new survey reveals the challenges IT departments face -- and why their bosses might be the cause.
Two out of three IT managers say they're kept awake at night worrying about work, and 75% admit ongoing anxiety about application performance concerns, according to a recent online survey of 272 systems and applications managers conducted by TechWeb Network Research on behalf of OpTier, a provider of business transaction management software. InformationWeek.com is part of the TechWeb network.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, with 2.7 million members throughout the state, has implemented New York-based OpTier’s CoreFirst technology to improve service levels...
OpTier, a transaction workload management firm, has reported that Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota has implemented its CoreFirst product to improve customer service levels by reducing the amount of time customers spend retrieving information through its customer-facing web portals.
OpTier upgrades its flagship software to manage applications and transactions across IT domains.
There are innovative new approaches to tackle network monitoring, such as the technologies developed by emerging companies such as Bristol Technology and OpTier. These allow users to track each and every data transaction as it makes its way through an infrastructure.
The complexity of business-technology systems has always made it difficult for IT managers to meet the performance and availability demands of business.
Service Management from the Top and Bottom - It's essential to align IT with your organization's business goals, but the number and approaches can be overwhelming.
With more consumers monitoring their credit records online to fight fraud and protect themselves from identity theft, online credit-monitoring service TrueCredit has decided to ramp up its Web infrastructure to keep pace with demand.
Garnering 60 percent more votes than its closest competitor, OpTier Ltd.'s CoreFirst 1.4 product captured first place in the Network and Systems Management category of the Datamation Product of the Year 2006 awards.
Those who read this column frequently are aware of EMA's staunch advocacy of QoE or quality of experience, as a way of bootstrapping IT management towards a more business-aligned, customer centric view. But QoE presents some unusual challenges, and is still poorly understood since it demands a fundamental mind shift away from the "conveniently technical" towards the "humanly relevant."
Featuring support for pervasive enterprise platforms, CoreFirst(TM) v1.4 provides control over IT performance and service level agreement (SLA) management with performance alerts and granular reporting. It supports WebSphere and WebLogic portals as well as protocols such as LDAP, JMS, MQ, AS/400 connectivity, Staffware (Tibco), Jcomm, P4, and JCo. Web-based GUI enables real-time prioritization and transaction monitoring within multi-tier structure of IT environments.
"Point products are like dolphins, clearly more intelligent than other sea creatures and willing to please. These are vendors that specialize in specific areas and fill holes in management suites. They include application-monitoring vendors like OpTier..."
IT automation vendors last week upgraded their software platforms to help customers process jobs and manage workloads more efficiently across heterogeneous networks.
OpTier, a provider of transaction workload management solutions, has released a new version of CoreFirst. The new version has enhanced performance alerts and more granular reporting as well as stronger control over service levels, according to the company. A key component of this latest release is broad support for pervasive enterprise platforms, including SAP NetWeaver Application Server, SAP NetWeaver Portal, and Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise Database.
Network Architects managing massive infrastructures must make sure a downed server in North America doesn't mean the loss of a six-figure contract in Singapore. Is BSM the answer? Can it close the gap between IT and business goals?
Venture funding seems to be on the rise and software companies are getting the lion's share of the loot.
When Amir Alon, Yori Lavi, and Israel Mazin decided to form a startup in 2002, they went to some Fortune 1000 corporations and asked what kept their IT pros awake at night. The answer: measuring and maintaining performance as their IT infrastructure shifted from client-server to .Net and J2EE architectures.
OpTier, the leading provider of software that dynamically manages transaction workloads to assure IT business service levels and optimise resources for the enterprise, is partnering with Avnet Partner Solutions to help enterprises improve the performance of their IT infrastructures. With Avnet Partner Solutions as OpTier's first official distributor in Europe, qualified resellers can now give enterprise customers access to OpTier's flagship product, CoreFirst.
Corporate presence and expanding resource base support launch of CoreFirst in Europe
OpTier, the leading provider of software that dynamically manages transaction workloads to assure IT business service levels and optimise resources for the enterprise, is partnering with Avnet Partner Solutions to help enterprises improve the performance of their IT infrastructures. With Avnet Partner Solutions as OpTier’s first official distributor in Europe, qualified resellers can now give enterprise customers access to OpTier’s flagship product, CoreFirst.
OpTier, the leading provider of transaction workload management software, today announced that it has officially opened its European headquarters for sales, marketing and technical support in Hendon, North London. Amir Rosentuler, Vice President for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) will head the office, which is currently hiring sales, marketing and technical staff, and is located at Foframe House, 35/37 Brent Street in London, England.
OpTier executives liken their adventures in starting the company to those of Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi in "The Blues Brothers." Early on, the team decided they were "on a mission to solve another huge problem" for IT infrastructure managers by first gaining visibility into the transaction level of IT applications and services, and then by automatically allocating resources across heterogeneous environments based on pre-defined business priorities.
CoreFirst product description.
OpTier has debuted CoreFirst, a solution designed to ensure performance for IT business services. CoreFirst automatically prevents problems in real time and provides transaction visibility into multitier workloads in production. CoreFirst also aligns IT performance with business objectives.
Newcomer OpTier has its sights set on helping network executives better allocate IT resources based on pre-defined policies. The company this week is expected to unveil software that monitors IT components and automates transactions across them based on increased user demands or changing IT conditions.
