News

BMC: Customers Press for Datacenter App Certification

• By Scott Bekker
• 01/22/2001

BMC Software’s Patrol for Windows 2000 Servers, an automated system monitoring and management tool, recently became just the third application to earn the Certified for Windows 2000 Datacenter Server logo.

“All the customers that we’ve talked to, plus the analysts that we’ve seen, have told us customers specifically don’t buy products for Windows 2000 [Datacenter Server] unless they’ve been Datacenter certified,” says Kim Roy, manager for product marketing for Windows 2000 solutions at BMC Software. “It’s really being driven by the customers more than the other certifications were.”

The company’s account confirms the predictions of some analysts, particularly at the Giga Information Group, that Microsoft Corp.’s certification program would be most important in the Windows 2000 Datacenter Server arena.

With Windows 2000, Microsoft significantly raised the bar on its application certification programs. Unlike the old Designed for logos of the Windows NT and BackOffice eras, the program is intended to highlight applications that take the most advantage of Microsoft’s new platform, rather than demonstrate sheer numbers of available applications.

The story seems to resonate best with customers interested in Microsoft’s high-end Windows 2000 Datacenter Server product, which only ships in specific, pre-tested hardware configurations to ensure high availability operating environments.

So far, Microsoft has certified its own SQL Server 2000 for Datacenter and NetIQ has achieved certification with its AppManager Suite. Other vendors publicly working on the Datacenter Server software certification include Computer Associates and Veritas Software.

By comparison, about 11 applications have passed the Windows 2000 Advanced Server logo test, 62 apps are now certified for Windows 2000 Server, and 95 qualify for the logo on Windows 2000 Professional. Because Datacenter Server was released about 6 months after the other versions of Windows 2000, certification testing didn’t begin until late September.

The Datacenter test adds additional functionality requirements on applications. For example, the application must run on a 4-node failover cluster and on a 32-processor machine. But the test also adds important support components, where the vendor must document the ability to support the application 24X7. The test also requires the application to run for a specified period of time under heavy loads without crashing. –

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