Privately-held FirstSense Software Inc claims to have covered new ground in the area of applications management software, launching its FirstSense Enterprise product, which it bills as the first applications management product that continuously monitors application performance from the end-user’s perspective and provides just-in-time performance management. FirstSense president and chief executive officer Cary Johnson insists his company’s offering is unique in that it offers diagnostic information at the precise moment a problem occurs, offering almost immediate resolution. The product uses an application monitoring technology called InfraSense which provides a constant polling function, as opposed to other application management software which wakes itself intermittently to collect historical data. The other main feature of the product is that it resides on the client and provides client-side view of the application to IT managers, allowing for diagnosis and management from the end user’s perspective. This function, says Johnson, is what makes his company’s offering complementary to existing network- and server-centric products on the market. FirstSense Enterprise is an open architecture product which is said to work with in-house applications as well as products from Oracle, Peoplesoft, Baan, Clarify and Scopus. The product, which is currently in beta is due to ship on June 15 and will cost $22,500 for an unlimited number of agents on a single server. FirstSense has already signed deals with a number of companies including: BMC Software Inc, which will integrate it with its Patrol product; Computer Associates International Inc, which is tying it into Unicenter TNG; Oracle Corp for its Oracle Applications offering; and Sybase Inc for its database and development tools. FirstSense also claims deals with Lucent Technologies Inc and InfoVista Corp. It’s currently in talks with systems integrators and Johnson promises announcements on that front within a couple of weeks. Burlington, Massachusetts-based FirstSense was founded last summer and its senior management team assembled in April after Johnson’s arrival. It has already raised $4.5m in a first round of venture funding and is currently pulling together a second round. It plans to go public at some point, but Johnson says it’s too early to speculate on when that might happen.
