Systems management company Boole & Babbage Inc, is currently reorganizing operations to incorporate its acquisition of Maxm Systems Corp. Maxm’s McLean, Virginia-based support staff will move to Boole’s support operation at head office in San Jose, California. Maxm has around 120 staff, from which there will be some lay-offs due to administrative overlap. In the UK, however, Boole & Babbage wants to hang on to all 14 Maxm staff, and senior management are being offered European or international roles. Boole has around 700 staff worldwide. The company snapped up $20m Maxm for the knock-down price of $25m last month, mainly for its US customer base of banks and railroad companies. Maxm’s Max/Enterprise manages non standard computer hardware such as Private Automatic Branch Exchanges – PABX. It will be merged into Boole’s Command/Post, but before this happens, there will be an upgrade and another release of the software – Version 4.0 – later this year. This new version will get the benefit of technology lifted from Boole’s systems management package Command/Post – peer-to-peer server communication. It will mean a Maxm system in Hong Kong can communicate with a Maxm server in London, and manage all workstations hanging off it. This could cut out the need for Hong Kong staff to work night shifts as operations can be overseen from London. An upgrade, due next month, will import Boole’s intelligent agents into Max/Enterprise, to manage distributed Windows NT, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX and NetWare systems. Additionally, Max/Enterprise will be able to phone a data processing manager and get her out of bed in the middle of the night to hear an error message read down the phone by a robotic voice. At the moment, the product can only send a message to a pager. Once awake, the data processing manager can take action to solve a problem, such as restarting a mainframe, or opening a trouble ticket in a Remedy helpdesk, by typing numbers on the telephone keypad. This summer both Boole and Maxm customers will get a new object oriented interface with luxuries such as drag and drop, and the ability to embed video clips, though initially it runs only under Windows NT. The Max/Enterprise system runs under OS/2. A new Web interface, which will ship next month for both Maxm and Boole customers, will give read-only access to systems management information. If this goes down well, Boole will bring out a version that enables computer managers to change thresholds over the Web. This could be ready as early as July. Boole & Babbage’s other product directions include an intelligent agent to manage IBM Corp’s message- oriented middleware, MQSeries. Boole has just brought out AutoOperator to run on the mainframe and manage IBM’s MQSeries. MQSeries enables NT servers in branch offices to update an application on an IBM mainframe, AS/400 or Unix box. If AutoOperator detects a problem with the queue of messages waiting to assail the mainframe, it can restart MQSeries or dynamically change the size of a queue. There are also agents that run on an NT box in a local branch, which can restart MQSeries on that machine. In this specialized management space, Boole & Babbage clashes mostly with Candle Corp in bids for business, but claims it’s coming out on top because Candle’s product foists an OS/2 or IBM AIX user interface on customers. Boole customers can choose from Windows NT, HP-UX or Solaris versions.
