Concord Casts Wider Spectrum

Spectrum, a network fault-management system developed by Cabletron in the early '90s, relies on a fault-correlation engine. I've tested it four times and found it as good or better than those from BMC, CA, HP and IBM. Concord offers strong performance monitoring and, with Spectrum, will be able to gather metrics from just about every aspect of delivery in a networked application.

The two companies should work well together. Their product lines don't overlap, and their combined customer base will be about 4,000 (1,000 from Aprisma, and 3,000 from Concord). The big winners will be enterprises using systems from both, especially when Concord adapts its eHealth software to incorporate Spectrum's correlation capabilities. Over the long haul, Concord will compete with HP, IBM and others in the big-time business-service management game, which requires both a platform and monitoring.