In my job, I have the opportunity to chat with a lot of vendors. To be brutally honest, there are those I talk with that rarely offer anything truly compelling for the WindowsITPro audience. I'll have a catch-up chat with them and then relay my findings to all of you, and try to cast the information in as much of a positive light as possible. Then, there's the other side of the coin. There are some vendors that are truly pleasant to talk with because those are the ones that have exciting products and thrilling plans and roadmaps.
BlueStripe Software is one of those exciting companies with great products, and one company I enjoy catching up with periodically. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with the company again to hear about some new, valuable offerings and listen to what is planned in the near future. Of course, there are some aspects of our talk that have to remain private for now, considering BlueStripe will be making some big announcements at TechEd Europe in a couple months. Once the lid is popped on that news I'll be able to share more.
At its core, BlueStripe Software is a provider of management and monitoring solutions, with integrations into Microsoft System Center. Using Live Dashboards, Maps, and Monitoring, BlueStripe solutions can be integrated into Operations Manager, Orchestrator, and Service Manager to make the products better and more full-featured. And, in providing the integration, particularly with Operations Manager, BlueStripe can also give you data on Microsoft Azure, too.
If you've not had the chance to check-out BlueStripe's System Center integration, drop out HERE, to check them out.
In addition to the System Center integration, BlueStripe can also enable end-to-end monitoring and management for the various Cloud providers, like Azure, AWS, Rackspace, and others. Availability and alerting are key components to many businesses today, who are tasked with utilizing Cloud services. And, with recent happenings around outages for Azure, BlueStripe's Cloud OS solution can help the IT organization be more proactive and provide near real-time mitigations.
But, I believe, what really excited me about my recent chat with BlueStripe Software was the company's proof that its FactFinder application can be used as a key to helping organizations quickly migrate away from Windows Server 2003, which reaches end of life on July 14, 2015. FactFinder can help discover application workloads and server dependencies automatically and then provide assessment and validate migration successes. Using Microsoft's own technologies, you can definitely perform the migration, but Microsoft is stating that a proper server migration takes over 300 days from planning to completion. However, FactFinder can cut the migration time dramatically because it automates much of the work. With a short time left for Windows Server 2003 support, most organizations need to get moving quickly, particularly since we know that every migration produces post-migration pains where issues have to be ironed-out while in production. No matter how much pre-migration planning and testing is done, there's always issues left unaccounted. Fortunately, BlueStripe Software knows this, too, and has orchestrated a solution.
Here's the differences between a Microsoft solution and a Microsoft solution with BlueStripe:
To help organizations get started, BlueStripe Software is offering offering 3 free months of 24x7 application and transaction monitoring using FactFinder. You can drop the company a request on their Contact Us page and let them know you heard about it here.
