FROM THE SIA SHOW: Enigmatec Launches Infrastructure Management Tool

Engimatec (booth #4124), a provider of grid-computing technology for the financial-services industry, has released a new product to help users manage complex infrastructures more efficiently and reduce costs. The Reactive Intelligence Framework " Execution Management System (RIF-EMS) automates infrastructure management and enables the user to design and implement policies around managing an infrastructure.

"Execution management is about being proactive and responding to situations as they develop and having policies in place to deal with them as they develop," says Duncan Johnston-Watt, cofounder and chief technology officer at Enigmatec.

According to Enigmatec, RIF-EMS aims to help users reduce operating expenses by running applications across a resource pool of servers. Users can model their infrastructure and develop policies defining actions that should be taken to respond to changes within the infrastructure. RIF-EMS can be deployed for certain application groups or adopted across the enterprise.

"The infrastructure is becoming increasingly complex, with trends in applications creating more moving parts with hundreds, if not thousands, of business applications," says Johnston-Watt. "Execution management allows the user to reduce the complexity, as well as the exposure to operational risk."

This also spills over into the disaster-recovery and business-continuity planning areas, says Johnston-Watt, as the plans will come into effect automatically when problems or outages are detected in the infrastructure. RIF-EMS can be used to define recovery procedures at every level, and users can also design those strategies to be coordinated, prioritized and executed automatically, depending on conditions as they happen within the enterprise, he adds.

RIF-EMS is built leveraging Enigmatec's middleware product, which enables distributed processing across multiple applications. In other words, applications often have dedicated equipment that is only 10 to 15 percent utilized. With distributed processing, the user can share capacity across applications and ultimately reduce expenses. When multiple applications use the same management system, such as RIF-EMS, they can coordinate and share the resources according to pre-defined policies that dictate how and when two or more separate applications can or can't share resources.

"It's about partitioning complex transactions and distributing the business processing across the right components, making sure you optimize the infrastructure," Johnston-Watt says. He adds that at least two top investment banks and a large buy-side firm are evaluating the RIF-EMS product. "Whether buy side or sell side, complex infrastructures can benefit by automating the management," he explains. <<<