The system-monitoring suite purchased from Mid-Comp International fills a hole in the Halcyon product line in the critical area of capacity planning.
Halcyon Software has acquired the technology for Snapshot/TSC monitoring suite from Mid-Comp International, and users who may have cancelled their maintenance with Mid-Comp International can breathe a sigh of relief that their beloved Snapshot will now be supported by a crack team of developers.
We spoke with Halcyon this week about their newly acquired product, and we can report that there are many key people throughout the world, from Snapshot resellers to end users, who are happy that Snapshot is now in good hands. Halcyon will soon extend an invitation to anyone who has cancelled maintenance with Mid-Comp to receive a free upgrade to the current version of Snapshot, which is V10.6.
The fate of Mid-Comp International Pty Ltd and its other products, including ERP solution Odyssey and Stockman supply-chain software, isn't entirely clear. It appears that Mid-Comp, based in Melbourne, Australia, filed for bankruptcy sometime this spring and was assigned a receiver or advocate on March 18. Its Web site, www.midcomp.com/au, was down this week when we checked, but industry observers told us the company sold off Snapshot/TSC as part of an asset liquidation in order to "keep going." So the move may be reorganization, and Mid-Comp may emerge debt free or lighter of load. Efforts to contact the company this week were unsuccessful. (I'm sure saying this will generate a call from someone with the firm, so expect to read more about this in a future issue of MC TNT.)
Nevertheless, the positive upshot of all this is that Snapshot/TSC, which has about 400 satisfied customers across the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific, is now in reliable hands, and Halcyon has committed to support it now and for the foreseeable future.
Asked whether they would merge Snapshot into their existing line of monitoring products, such as Operations Center, Halcyon officials said that it's not the plan at the moment, and, depending on how things go, it could actually be ported to other platforms if sufficient user demand suggests a market for it. Halcyon's current product line can monitor other platforms besides IBM i, including AIX/UNIX, Windows, and Linux. So the path may be from Snapshot up to Halcyon's other suites for monitoring across multiple platforms or if one were to need more comprehensive real-time monitoring or specialized tools for job scheduling, disk space, or spool file management and automated system saves.
The exciting features that Snapshot has that Halcyon products were missing are focused in two areas: 1) Snapshot's sophisticated capability to do capacity planning and 2) the ability for users to drill down into customer usage and performance data. While Snapshot may be positioned in the market as a low-entry product for users who want to have a basic customizable interface for managing their IBM i servers, it has some top-end technology under the covers. Say your company is planning on acquiring another firm and you expect to add 80 more users to your existing IBM server. Snapshot can accurately forecast what is likely to happen to your system performance and make projections on disk utilization even before the papers are signed by the company lawyers. Is this going to mean you will have to upgrade your system? That could be nice to know before you commit to moving forward.
With Snapshot, users have what is almost a data warehouse of information on system performance. While the IBM i server has real-time usage data and a history that goes back 10 days, the data gathered by the server's collection tools is typically ported over to a PC. The beauty of this is that, say, you download the server data to your PC before you go home for the weekend. You're sitting on the couch watching Desperate Housewives with one eye and evaluating what's been going on with your server by scanning your laptop data with the other. (Yeah! You're actually multitasking—finally!). You review various trends that have been occurring over the past few months and, eureka! You realize the company is going to have to buy some more DASD within the next six months if trends continue as they have been. You close your laptop and finish watching the program with your significant other, satisfied in the knowledge that you can go in Monday morning with a bit of important information. You arrive at work a half-hour early and hook up your laptop to the server; Snapshot syncs the current data with what's on your laptop so you know what happened over the weekend, and you confidently march into the weekly staff meeting.
Life is good. There usually is a good ending to stories about good people. Snapshot/TSC is good people. We're tentatively hoping for some positive news about Odyssey and Stockman and other products by a good company, Mid-Comp International. And congrats to Halcyon for stepping up to the plate on this one. It should open up new markets for the company through a reseller channel in the Asia Pacific region (as well as Europe and the Americas) where Snapshot resellers can now cross-sell both Halcyon Operations Center and Snapshot product lines.
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