Company
News
COMPUTER ASSOCIATES SHIPS NEUGENTS
Revolutionary Technology Enables New Generation Of
Business Applications
ISLANDIA, N.Y., December 8, 1998-- Computer Associates International,
Inc. (CA) today began shipping the first implementation of Neugents™ , its revolutionary neural network
technology. Neugents enable an entirely new generation of business applications that can
not only analyze conditions in business markets and technical environments, but also
predict changes in those conditions and suggest courses of action to proactively
capitalize on opportunities and/or avoid potential problems.
Just as importantly, Neugents can perform these valuable functions through
"self-learning" processes that empower them to progressively assimilate new
information and apply it to new situations without manual programming. Thus, for the first
time, software can instinctively identify new business markets, spotlight new sources of
revenue and intelligently automate business functions.
The first implementation, Unicenter TNGÒ Neugents, can
proactively prevent performance and availability problems with a level of precision and
rigor unattainable by today's conventional trend and resource analysis solutions. Future
implementations of Neugents will encompass active data mining, e-commerce, financial
services and other mission-critical business applications.
"This announcement underscores CA's conviction that, to truly achieve their
business objectives, IT departments have to move from fixing problems to preventing
them," said CA Chairman and CEO Charles B. Wang. "Neugents are a
ground-breaking solution that will empower IT to deliver the service levels that today's
digital enterprises require at staffing levels they can afford."
This powerful solution results from the seamless integration of two complementary CA
technologies --the ability of Neugents to perform multi-dimensional pattern recognition
based on historical performance data and the power of Unicenter TNG to monitor the IT
environment from an end-to-end business-process perspective.
"With business applications becoming increasingly more complex and
mission-critical in nature, it is more necessary than ever for IT staffs to proactively
predict and address performance and availability problems before any downtime
occurs," said Steve Foote, senior vice president, Hurwitz Group. "By working
closely with its customers, Computer Associates has recognized this challenge and has
implemented an exciting strategy to address these major issues."
Unicenter TNG Neugents help enable corporate IT departments to achieve
unprecedented service levels by effectively predicting and avoiding network outages while
reducing the time-consuming efforts required to develop threshold-based policies or other
customization. By providing true proactive problem prevention, Unicenter TNG Neugents
offer the ability to avoid the significant costs associated with downtime and poor
performance --including lost productivity, revenues and business opportunities.
Once Neugents have "learned" sufficient history, they can automatically
generate predictions of future system performance and availability based on existing
conditions. Based on their analysis, Unicenter TNG Neugents can generate a predictive
alert, such as: "There is a 70 percent chance the system will experience a
performance bottleneck in 40 minutes."
"The industry has never seen new technology make such a compelling business
case," said Wang. "We are giving clients a solution that will make time an ally
instead of an enemy."
Rave Reviews From Users
Unicenter TNG Neugents have already made a significant impact on the operations of
a number of Windows NT users who have tested the neural network-enabled
Unicenter TNG.
"Neugents can take two weeks of historical performance data, and in 15 minutes,
train the neural network," said Rob Raeseman, systems project leader, Jacksonville
Electric Authority. "Then you're off and running. Neugents can detect if something's
wrong, even if you never imagined a particular system event or concurrence of events could
ever possibly happen - let alone program for that situation."
"Not only are Neugents powerful out of the box, but they get even more powerful
the more you use them," said Yousef Lasi, systems architect, NCI Information Systems.
"That's because the more data it collects, the more it learns. And the more it
learns, the more accurate its predictions."
"The most impressive thing about this technology is Neugents' ability to predict
events," said Bruce Allison, manager, technical support services at DAOU Systems,
Inc. "In one of our first experiences with Neugents, they predicted that a server had
100 percent probability of a severe performance degradation. Sure enough, as we watched
and monitored the server, performance was severely impacted. The Neugents traced it to a
network bottleneck."
"Neugents enable us to maintain equipment and critical services at levels
heretofore unheard of," said James E. Stoucker, vice president of Consulting
Services, NCI Information Systems, Inc. "In a domain where a few seconds of downtime
can mean tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue, the ability to employ Neugents to
prevent the loss of critical server availability is essential. Once you get used to the
benefits derived from this revolutionary technology, there's just no
going back."
Data Intelligence For The Bottom Line
Unicenter TNG Neugents enable organizations to perform predictive management of
distributed environments. While humans are adept at monitoring a handful of parameters,
Neugents can automatically analyze and monitor thousands of parameters simultaneously.
Neugents accomplish this through adaptive pattern recognition and sophisticated clustering
analysis of information gathered by the Unicenter TNG infrastructure.
Employing the latest advances in neural network technology, the Neugents' predictive
capabilities leapfrog conventional trend analysis and narrow, rule-based approaches.
Instead of using predefined and static management policies, Neugents continually monitor a
system, comparing it to its recognized common modes of behavior. When they encounter an
uncommon condition, the Neugents make a prediction on the probability of a failure and
trigger an alert to Unicenter TNG so it can take appropriate action.
Pricing and Availability
Pricing for Unicenter TNG Neugents starts at $2,000 for Windows NT servers.
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