Change Control Management Enables Single, Consistent View of Changes
Product Coverage

Mercury Interactive has announced an automated change control management offering for change advisory boards (CABs) and IT decision makers. The main goal of Mercury Change Control Management is to make CABs more effective at mitigating the business risks of change.

Although CABs typically serve as the last line of defense to mitigate business risks before changes are approved and deployed into production, they are limited in their visibility into the impact those changes will have on business services. “The reason for this is that the CABs lack any kind of automated solution today to make these risk-based decisions. Their decisions are made based on past experiences, subjectivity and ‘gut-feel,’” says Simon Berman, senior director of products.

Mercury Change Control Management, however, corrects that problem by aggregating all the change demands (operational, application and strategic) into a single IT infrastructure library-based view. It then performs an impact analysis on every single change to identify the affected business services and applications. It also identifies change collisions that might occur when two or more changes that affect the same configuration items are released at the same time.

The product helps automate the change management process in five ways: through change impact analysis, change collision prevention, consolidated service desks, efficient scheduling and timely communication.

“With Mercury Change Control, businesses can replace multiple CABs, operating in silos, with a single board that views all changes in a consistent format,” Berman explains.

Specifically, the product addresses the need to reduce business risk by enabling CABs to accurately assess the effect changes will have on business services, the need for minimal risk of production outages by identifying potential change collisions and alerting system and application owners before changes are deployed, the need for a single view and a consistent format for change requests across the organization so a central CAB can make informed decisions, and the need for a consolidated, real-time view of change release schedules. In addition, the product automatically notifies key stakeholders of potential impacts.

Mercury Change Control Management is priced at approximately $100,000 for an initial deployment.

For more information, go to: www.mercury.com

May2006, Software Magazine