What Makes Tideway Foundation
Unique?

At Tideway, we're fanatical about data center search. We live, eat and breathe it. So if you're looking for a product that doesn't just promise value, but delivers value - Tideway is the natural choice. Here's why we stand out from the crowd.

The Top 7 Technical Reasons to Love Tideway Foundation

A Data Model That Fits Your Data Center

Data center configurations are complex, deeply interconnected and constantly changing - one-size-fits-all data models don't work. Rather than try to shoehorn this model into an RDBMS, we use an Object-Mesh Database that stores a mesh of objects, where each object represents a real thing. It can be extended on the fly to add new object types, relationships, or attributes.
Find out more about the datastore.

Everything is Searchable

Everything in the datastore is searchable - including any of your custom attributes - without having to worry about speed/indexing trade-offs. Think of it as Google for anything and everything in the datacenter. There is also a query language if you want to get sophisticated.
Find out more about the query language.

Expert Interpretation of Discovered Data

Template based discovery simply can’t handle situations that require cycles of investigation. Our reasoning engine develops an accurate model of the infrastructure by investigating it just like a human would: Collect raw data, apply expertise to interpret the data, and conduct further investigations based on what has been learned.
Demystifying Discovery.

Automatically Knows About New Products

Every month, Tideway Foundation is made smarter. Knowledge Updates allow Foundation to recognise more common software products, versions, virtualization techniques, and other technologies. We add 300-400 new product configurations each month - that’s a lot of work you don’t have to do.
Find out how the knowledge library is updated.

Shows Clear Evidence For How Conclusions Are Reached

“I want the truth” “You can’t handle the truth” (provenance). We all want to know exactly what is in our data centers - even though sometimes the truth isn’t what we expect. When Foundation identifies something, it records the provenance to show exactly how that conclusion was reached. This builds trust in the data, and whether you can handle the truth or not - you have proof it is accurate.

Keeps Information Stable

If you can’t log into a server - does that mean it isn’t there? Most discovery products will assume it isn’t, causing a configuration management fire-drill to manually reconcile with the expected model. Foundation intelligently maintains a far more stable view of the world, accounting for temporary outages and other real-life events, along with a full history of changes.
See how Foundation tracks changes over time.

Analytical Tools for Interactive Analysis

Slice, dice and analyse Foundation’s rich view of your data center with a set of analytical tools right in the browser. Tideway provides a large number of out-of-box dashboards, charts, reports and visualizations that, combined with pervasive search, are powerful jumping-off points for data analysis and exploration.
See how an end-of-life software dashboard can help remove unsupported software.

Experts in Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping

We are specialists in our area, and have the largest dedicated technical team in this problem space. When you select Tideway you can be confident you are getting the experts in application discovery and dependency mapping. Meet some of the team:

Adam Kerrison

Chief Technology Officer

Adam is one of the founders of Tideway. He was previously responsible for the Micromuse Netcool product - so knows a thing or two about building massively scalable systems.
Read more about Adam

Allan Mertner

VP Engineering

Allan used to run development for Peregrine's Enterprise Discovery product, now part of HP. He understands what it takes to deliver a product that relies upon expert developers and community contribution.
Read more about Allan Mertner

Martin McEvoy

Senior Technical Consultant

Martin is an ITIL expert, and has deep experience of CMDB implementation in large IT environments. He knows exactly why application dependency mapping is a great place to start when you're thinking CMDB.
Read more about Martin McEvoy

Duncan Grisby

Chief Software Architect

Duncan is one of the founders of Tideway. He is the author of OmniORB - the popular open-source CORBA ORB. Duncan has a PhD in distributed systems from Cambridge University.
Read more about Duncan

A Community of Thousands

Free Downloadable Version

The community edition of Foundation is available for free download, and is suitable for small IT environments, or for testing purposes. We also regularly publish pre-releases of the next release of Foundation to showcase the latest features and gather community feedback.

An Encyclopedia of IT Configurations

We publish our knowledge of IT configurations in the publically available ‘Configipedia’. This details the distinguishing features of software in the wild - and how we use that to recognise and version discovered products. Configipedia content is developed by our own knowledge team, as well as our user community.

Publicly Available Pre-releases

We think openness is vital to developing the best software out there in the market. In order to make sure that we're developing features our community wants and needs, we make pre-releases available for public download. We also provide forums to discuss what's working, and what isn't. Why not give it a spin, see some of the cool new things we're working on, and let us know how it works for you?

Active Problem Solving

Our forums provide a way to get direct access to our engineering and services teams, meaning users’ problems are addressed fast - from newbies just getting set up, to experts using Foundation in new and exciting ways.

5x ROI in as Little as 90 Days

Tideway Foundation pays for itself - sometimes in as little as 30 days! Customers regularly achieve a 5x ROI within 90 days. You can rapidly identify opportunities for cost savings in hardware and software and avoid the cost of downtime by uncovering potential risk. Automate what is today, a manual and inaccurate process. With ROI like this, it’s clear why our clients call our implementations "self-funding initiatives."

1 Day - Server Inventory

Foundation is delivered as a virtual appliance - so there is no database to install and configure, drivers to choose, operating systems to patch, or Apache servers to set up. By the end of your first day with Foundation, you’ll have a good understanding of the server and switch inventory across the infrastructure - including an estimated server count and a list of which machines (by DNS name or IP) are running which operating systems.

1 Week - Infrastructure Baseline

After one week you’ll have an accurate server and switch count, understand all definitive and alias host names and know which operating systems are on each host, including patch level information. Software inventory will also be clear - including instances of common off-the-shelf (COTS) products and their versions. This will help you manage software licences more effectively, mitigate risks of un-patched or non-compliant software versions, and perform fast diagnostic troubleshooting.

1 month - Business Application Maps

In less than 30 days with Foundation you’ll have mapped some of your business application - showing precisely how IT components - switches, servers, hardware and software correlate to them. Now, you’ll be able to easily demonstrate how business applications are supported by IT infrastructure end-to-end - a growing requirement for regulatory compliance. Change and problem management processes will also be more efficient now that you can rely on an automated view of dependencies between all hardware and software components and quickly determine their impact on business applications.

No Hardware or Software Agenda.

We don’t force our clients to buy into a legacy framework, but let them choose the right tools for the right job. We are agnostic and interoperable and can act as a single hub of high quality data for multiple service management technologies.