Once seen as the odd company out in the consolidation of discovery and mapping software vendors, Tideway is now very clearly carving out its own niche and positioning in the space, and growing rapidly in the process.

Wachovia is working on a project of staggering scope: a 3-D map of the firm’s datacenter operations. To generate the 3-D models, the financial services company is using geospatial data and also partnering with a pair of vendors, Tideway Systems and Intepoint, as well as the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, which has a visualization center.

Linklaters is a law firm which specialises in advising the world’s leading companies, financial institutions and governments on their most challenging transactions and assignments. Global law firm Linklaters deployed Tideway Foundation across 30 offices in 23 countries to obtain a clear, up-to-date picture of its entire IT infrastructure, improve its system management processes and deliver superior client service.

“As a global company with a highly sophisticated IT infrastructure, this project will remove approximately five-sixths of the cost of manually maintaining multiple configuration management databases. It will also simultaneously generate significant related returns attributable to reduced downtime of application and management overhead in approving changes.”

JPMorgan offers M&A advisory, capital markets, prime brokerage, restructuring, risk and research platform of unrivalled strength and scale. JPMorgan have used Tideway Foundation across several lines of business to improve application availability, and support regulatory compliance requirements.

“Of the three candidate solutions, one could not handle the network and access complexity. The second vendor had difficulty getting its proposed solution up and running. Even when it was eventually running, the solution produced relatively little information. The third vendor’s solution, Tideway Systems, ran smoothly and produced usable information in less than a day. Simply accepting this proof of concept, however, was not sufficient. The company then performed an extensive analysis of the lab test environment. This was to verify that the results produced by Automated Application Discovery (AAD) were accurate and complete. The Tideway results were the most accurate.”

“AAD is common sense. But it continues to amaze me how much enterprise architects, and CIOs, do not know about what their organization possesses. You have to know what you have in order to develop a good architecture, ensure that architecture is used, and then demonstrate what it delivers.”

“Take the example of database schemas and stored procedures. If we changed a service or an application or a stored procedure, or even introduced a patch for one client – this could have unintended consequences for other clients. Identifying such unintended knock-on effects after the fact is extraordinarily difficult. We might not even have known, before we corrected this, what exactly had affected those other clients or why.”

“If any further proof was needed that the manual collection of data was inadequate, this was it. Confidence built in our company that AAD could provide an ongoing single source of truth and this one discovery convinced many of the skeptics — particularly those from operations.”

In an environment where customers were concerned with the impact of deploying agents, the provider needed an agentless tool they could deploy in days. The team called on Tideway Foundation™. By deploying Foundation, the provider could discover and validate IT asset information and consolidation data and identify systems exceptions and software license data.

By implementing Foundation the bank obtained a clear picture of how deployed IT assets related to their strategic architecture. The critical data provided by Foundation enabled the bank to accelerate and improve problem identification and resolution and strengthen their overall resilience.

Traditional manual audit and maintenance techniques could not meet the new requirements of this service organization – an automated approach was the only solution. The provider turned to Tideway Foundation™, and today the firm is transforming their reactive information technology organization into a proactive, business-driven information services unit.

When this global outsourcer needed to automatically record all applications, configurations, deployments, amendments, and changes, they realized they needed a single tool that could handle enterprise-wide discovery, identify dependencies, populate their CMDC and improve change control processes. However, this provider has the highest data security access levels outside of the Secret Service – which means they need a highly complex network and data management design.

The Carphone Warehouse is Europe’s leading independent retailer of mobile phones and services, with over 2,400 stores in 9 countries. Carphone Warehouse engaged with Tideway to address a number of outages related to uncertainty of the precise contents and connectivity of the software systems in their data centers. They had also suffered an incident in a data center that lead to the loss of application services that were not documented as residing in that location.

British American Tobacco is the world’s second largest quoted tobacco group by global market share, with brands sold in more than 180 markets. British American Tobacco had requirements to consolidate data centers and to optimise and rearchitect their extensive instances of SAP software. Tideway was deployed to baseline their environment in advance of these critical projects.

Operating in over 170 countries, BT is one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services. BT engaged with Tideway on a project to faciliate the rapid resolution of data center outages, and to rationalise its software and hardware infrastructure.

RTC provides outsourcing solutions for a number of financial services organizations in Switzerland. RTC is using Tideway Foundation to improve its service management processes by providing a clear up-to-date picture of the configuration of its IT infrastructure at any given time. The solution will help RTC’s clients to automate business service views including change, incident and problem management processes to allow for improvements to change processes.

Logica is a leading IT and business services company, employing 39,000 people across 36 countries. They enable business transformation for their customers through the innovative use of technology.

Dimension Data is a specialist IT services and solutions provider that helps clients plan, build, support and manage their IT infrastructures. Dimension Data used Tideway Foundation to gain visibility into the complex customer environments that they took under management to support greater efficiency in management, assisting their margins.

BP is one of the world’s largest energy companies, providing its customers with fuel for transportation, energy for heat and light, retail services and petrochemicals products for everyday items.

BHP Billiton is a global leader in the resources industry. Formed from a merger between BHP and Billiton, it brings together an exceptional mix of quality, low-cost resource assets, complemented by a strong management team determined to operate its assets in an efficient manner.

Avis Rent A Car System, LLC and its subsidiaries operate one of the world’s leading car rental brands, providing business and leisure customers with a wide range of services at more than 2,000 locations. Avis use Tideway Foundation to assist with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and to support their server rationalization programs.

GlaxoSmithKline have a challenging and inspiring mission: to improve the quality of human life by enabling people to do more, feel better and live longer. Headquartered in the UK and with operations based in the US, they are one of the industry leaders, with an estimated seven per cent of the world’s pharmaceutical market.

Transunion provides credit & information management solutions to more than 50,000 businesses worldwide in 25 countries on 5 continents. It maintains credit histories on 500 million consumers around the globe. Transunion rely on Tideway Foundation to provide the day-to-day reporting and visualization for system changes to be made safely and for the highest levels of security to be maintained.

Standard Chartered operates in many of the world’s fastest growing markets, and derives over 90 per cent of its profits from the emerging trade corridors of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Tideway has conducted multiple projects at Standard Chartered including software license management and a data centre move.

ING is a global financial services company providing banking, investments, life insurance and retirement services. It serves more than 75 million customers in Europe, the United States, Canada, Latin America, Asia and Australia. Tideway provides a managed service based on Foundation to generate IT intelligence that forms the basis for INGs Configuration Management Database (CMDB).

Nationwide has mutual status, which means it is owned by and run for the benefit of their members. They are the UK’s second largest mortgage lender and second largest savings provider. More significantly, they are the largest building society in the world. The company turned to its partner Computacenter and Tideway Foundation to support both data center consolidation initiatives and also a move to higher utilisation of expensive server hardware through the deployment of VMware-based virtualisation.

Jefferies is a global, full service investment banking and institutional securities firm operating in more than 25 offices in six countries spanning three continents. Jefferies are using Tideway to support a series of data center moves and technology transformations.

The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is a bank holding company and a leading global investment banking, securities and investment management firm. Goldman Sachs engaged with Tideway to improve operational resillience and also to support data center moves and technology transformations.

The Co-Operative Bank is part of The Co-operative Group, the UK’s largest consumer co-operative. The Co-Operative Bank was suffering from excessively high software licensing costs, so worked with Tideway to track software instances actually running in their data centers.

Mizuho International plc (‘MHI’) is the London based securities underwriting, broking and trading company within the Mizuho Financial Group

Agentless tools do not install anything on servers and clients, making them easier and faster to implement. It also enables them to cover more of the infrastructure, including previously unknown servers, because you cannot install an agent on a server you do not know you have.

…knowing where everything is means you feel more confident that you know exactly what is going on, what the risks are, and how to resolve the problems.

Once the data center project is done, Wachovia plans to use the Tideway software with the services-oriented architecture the firm is building, so that someday it will automatically monitor all web services. It will also be used with overall configuration management projects.