Tangram Releases Asset Insight(TM) 2.3
PR Newswire, Thursday, November 06, 1997 at 10:49
Includes Year 2000 Enhancement To Address Risks in the Distributed Environment
CARY, N.C., Nov. 6 /PRNewswire/ -- Corporations seeking to manage their
Year 2000 (Y2K) risks in the distributed enterprise now have a strategic
solution to do so. Tangram Enterprise Solutions, Inc., the industry's leading
provider of business software for tracking Information Technology (IT) assets
in the distributed enterprise, announced today that it has begun to roll out a
Year 2000 enhanced version of Asset Insight, the company's flagship asset
tracking product.
Tangram's Senior Vice President of Technology, Steven Kuekes, said the new
version will empower corporations with current and historical information
about their assets so they can locate, cost-out, manage and correct Y2K risks
at the desktop. According to Kuekes, the enhancement will provide customers
with a series of customized Y2K analyses that pinpoint where specified "at-
risk" software assets reside in the enterprise, calculate the costs of
upgrading at-risk assets to acceptable risk levels, provide an "at a glance"
timeline of the correction process so that corporations know where they are in
meeting critical Y2K deadlines, and monitor the correction process to ensure
that Y2K problems do not re-emerge.
"To date organizations have been focusing their attention on correcting
Y2K problems in central, mainframe applications," Kuekes observed. "But
there's another time bomb waiting to detonate when the millennium strikes, and
that's the Y2K problem in the distributed enterprise of workstations and
servers. In fact, the workstations and servers, which have become a critical
part of corporate productivity, might be the worst culprits, posing the
greatest risk to corporations," Kuekes explained. "With Asset Insight,
corporations now have the solution they need to address "at-risk" assets in
the distributed environment."
Incorporated in the new release are three Risk Analyses, including a Risk
Assessment report that not only identifies Y2K exposure by spotlighting the
number of desktops with at-risk software, it also identifies risk distribution
by department. The Risk Correction Analysis is used to determine the cost of
upgrades for non-compliant desktops. The report provides cost breakdowns for
desktop software, memory, hard drives, labor, and lost productivity. The Risk
Management Analysis helps administrators keep vigilance over the number of
desktops that need to be upgraded each day to meet the Y2K deadline; it also
highlights new Y2K problems that re-emerge in the enterprise.
In addition to the Y2K enhancement, Tangram has added several new features
to Asset Insight 2.3, including an active audit feature and an
InterviewBuilder screen, in response to customer requests and needs.
Active Audit Functionality Continuously Enforces Standards
One way organizations can reduce their computing costs is to create and
enforce desktop standards. In doing so, companies can take advantage of
volume discounts, reduce the number of vendors they deal with and minimize
help desk support needs. To help Tangram's customers determine whether desktop
standards are being violated across the enterprise, Asset Insight 2.3 includes
an Active Audit function that automatically issues e-mail alerts or SNMP traps
as soon as any violations are detected. This function can be used to enforce
any enterprise standard.
For example, if a customer has determined that a particular word
processing program is not Year 2000 compliant, and an installation occurs
within the enterprise, Asset Insight will automatically ferret out the
violation, and notify an administrator via e-mail or SNMP trap, reducing the
chance for risk within the organization.
InterviewBuilder Tracks Any Information
To meet the unique information needs of enterprise users, Tangram
incorporated an InterviewBuilder into its latest release of Asset Insight.
Thanks to this new functionality, customers can now track any type of
information they want by building their own user data screens, or selecting a
series of preformatted user screens. For example, customers can create
screens that prompt users to enter equipment tag IDs, or screens that allow
service technicians to record workstation maintenance data. Upon completion,
Asset Insight automatically adds all of the information to the central asset
repository where it is available for reports and ad hoc queries.
Pricing
Asset Insight 2.3 is available for purchase through Tangram's value-added
reseller and integrator channel. A partial listing includes: EDS, CompuCom,
Unisys, Vanstar, Pomeroy Computer Resources, Computer Horizons, Dana
Commercial Credit, XLConnect and others. The suggested cost is between $30 and
$80 per node, depending upon the channel partner and the services provided. |
