mValent Accelerates Enterprise ITIL Adoption with Enhancements to its Infrastructure Automation Suite

Infrastructure Automation Suite Version 2.3 includes New IT Process Automation Capabilities to Ensure Fast, Efficient Compliance with Global ITIL Standard

Burlington, Mass. – September 27, 2004 – mValent, Inc., the pioneering provider of IT process automation software for deploying Web-based enterprise applications, announced enhancements to its Infrastructure Automation Suite™ (IAS) that enable large enterprises to radically accelerate the implementation of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) standard.

ITIL has become the de facto global standard for IT departments to achieve greater business effectiveness and operational efficiency. The standard provides a comprehensive and consistent set of best practices and process definitions for IT service management, promoting an approach to IT systems implementation and management that is similar to how “Total Quality Management” has been implemented across manufacturing processes.

“Many IT organizations are currently considering implementing ITIL to help them manage the rapid change and high expectations facing them today,” said Robin Bloor, co-founder of Baroudi Bloor Research. “With capabilities to embed key ITIL framework definitions into complex application configuration processes, and ensure their propagation in an automated fashion, mValent is uniquely poised to assist companies in their efforts to realize the enormous business benefits of ITIL. In addition to saving organizations thousands of man hours normally lost to manual infrastructure configuration processes, mValent embraces the tenets of ITIL for attaining greater efficiency, higher application throughput, and fewer errors.”

ITIL-Optimized Infrastructure Lifecycle Management
Already in use at some of the world’s top financial services, e-services, life sciences, aerospace and defense organizations, mValent Infrastructure Automation Suite 2.3 meets multiple ITIL process definitions across the application lifecycle – including development, pre-production, testing and production environments. Features include assisted discovery of configuration information at the most granular level, tracking of file interdependencies, the ability to easily identify, control and maintain configuration standards throughout the application lifecycle, and the automation of routine IT set-up and provisioning tasks.

Within the context of the ITIL framework, Infrastructure Automation Suite version 2.3 is uniquely designed to address key process definitions for ongoing change, configuration and release management. The mValent Infrastructure Automation Suites does this by:

• Providing visibility and control of changes to IT infrastructure by easily identifying configuration items, collecting and managing documentation about these changes, and sharing this information across all other processes.
• Addressing the controlled implementation of required changes to the IT infrastructure – following a path of definition, planning, building, testing, accepting, implementing and evaluating – so updates can be implemented with minimum, adverse impact on IT services. This capability provides more effective coordination of IT process management throughout the organization, enabling changes to be made in concert with the status monitoring activities of configuration and problem management teams.
• Implementing changes to hardware and software through automated release management capabilities. This ensures that that only tested and correct versions of authorized software and hardware are provided.

“Despite the enormous and proven benefits of the ITIL framework, we’ve found that early adopters of this standard have struggled to implement it,” said Swapnil Shah, president and CEO of mValent. “While it offers a comprehensive blueprint for improving business efficiency across IT operations, ITIL by itself is not a magic bullet. In order to succeed and see results quickly, IT organizations need a complete and actionable ITIL solution, such as the Infrastructure Automation Suite, which not only embeds best practices into configuration management processes, but offers acceleration and control of these definitions.”

Expanded Linux Support, Usability and Performance Improvements
In addition to capabilities for accelerating ITIL deployment, other enhancements to the mValent Infrastructure Automation Suite include:

• Expanded mValent client support for Linux-based applications and servers; such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.0 and 3.0;
  * User interface updates, including improvements to data viewing, find and replace, import and provisioning capabilities;
• Usability and performance improvements to the WebSphere 5.0 Automation Module, designed to automate the management of configuration definitions underlying this popular application server platform;
• Advancements to mValent’s unique parsing technology, enabling users to quickly load variable data and capture a value and definition for each configuration setting;
• New templates for replicating and promoting entire projects, including the ability to provision new changes to a local directory;
• Capabilities for the use of “tracking” to set alerts when changes have been made out of band or within the Infrastructure Automation Suite; updates to mValent’s “compare” technology to quickly troubleshoot configuration mismatches, and “find/replace” enhancements to easily issue a change across multiple end points.

“Having implemented the Infrastructure Automation Suite earlier this year, we’ve already realized a significant and measurable business return,” said Joe Bai, chief information officer at WorldWinner, a leading provider of competitive online games. “Our ability to accelerate complex application deployments without adding IT resources, has enabled us to continuously add new features to Worldwinner.com, and reclaim an estimated 1% of monthly revenues related to application downtime and configuration errors.”

Pricing and Availability
Version 2.3 of mValent’s Infrastructure Automation Suite will be available in October, 2004. Pricing starts at $50,000 (U.S.) and varies based on the number of users, automation modules, and configuration.

About mValent, Inc.
mValent, Inc. delivers software solutions that automate the building and maintenance of complex infrastructure configurations for Web-based enterprise applications throughout their entire lifecycle from development to production, across distributed and off-shore locations. The mValent Infrastructure Automation Suite enables IT organizations to increase efficiency by reducing configuration-related down-time and speeding applications to production. mValent is located in Burlington, Massachusetts, and has sales offices across North America. The privately held company is backed by top-tier venture capital firms, including Charles River Ventures, IDG Ventures and Polaris Venture Partners. For more information, visit mValent at www.mvalent.com.

Editor Note: mValent will be demonstrating the Infrastructure Automation Suite in booth #120 at the IT Service Management Forum at Long Beach Convention Center, Long Beach, California, September 27-29, 2004.