The Open Group Approves A New Management Application Standard

The Open Group, a vendor and technology-neutral consortium dedicated to enterprise integration, is approving a new management application standard: the Application Instrumentation and Control (AIC) Standard. The standard, submitted by J.P. Morgan & Co. Incorporated and Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) purports to help IT managers focus on managing IT resources to meet business objectives.

The AIC Standard addresses the pressing need for an applications management framework that is both business-process-focused and can be applied across a heterogeneous computing environment. The initial draft specification -- which defines an open two-way application programming interface -- has been proven by a reference implementation produced by J.P. Morgan in conjunction with CA. The reference implementation, based upon CA's Unicenter TNG enterprise management software, has successfully undergone advanced testing at J.P. Morgan. CA plans to deploy the standard in Unicenter TNG.

"The leadership demonstrated by J.P. Morgan is the strongest possible indication that customers urgently need greater interoperability from their IT suppliers," said Allen Brown, President and CEO of The Open Group. "We are proud to have been selected by Computer Associates and J.P. Morgan to help drive the consensus process that enables competing suppliers to deliver products that meet this market need."

The AIC standard enables technology managers to prioritize IT services based on their business impact by:

• Providing facilities for defining the critical resources that create, affect or deliver a business process
• Establishing a standard mechanism for managing control points within an application
• Creating a technology-neutral approach for integrating with external systems management frameworks.

"The introduction of the AIC standard opens the door to a new generation of business process management techniques," said Mike Reilly, J.P. Morgan's chief technology officer. "Companies using applications instrumented with AIC will now have the opportunity to monitor and manage the actual business process itself and not just the systems that support the process. This API is an excellent starting point for the development of end-to-end service level metrics focused on the availability and performance of our business process, not the underlying systems. As more applications migrate to hosting or ASP environments, we will need better tools to ensure the business is operating efficiently. This is one area where AIC will be a great help."

For more information on CA, visit http://www.cai.com.

For more information on J.P. Morgan, visit http://www.jpmorgan.com.

For more information on the Open Group, visit http://www.opengroup.org.