Large enterprise companies that need guaranteed high performance and scalability for their service management applications might want to consider StreamFoundry's software suite that addresses several tenets laid out in ITIL while running on an IBM mainframe.

StreamFoundry this week announced Central Management System (CMS) 3.0, an update to its flagship software that is now available using IBM's DB2 and z/OS. Company officials credit the product's architecture -- the software installs on an existing mainframe -- for enabling the centralization of ITIL-based disciplines including problem, incident, change, configuration and request management.

"We run our applications on the mainframe exclusively. There is no need to install software on mid-tier, distributed or Intel platforms, which enables us to address the management needs of the larger enterprise companies," says Marc Heimlich, vice president of marketing and sales at StreamFoundry. He says by running the software on the mainframe, companies are able to centralize management from the infrastructure level and better support the network, server and application layers. "The result is an improvement in mean-time-to-repair, data integrity and Quality of Service," he says.

The company, which has been in business about five years and shipping product for four, competes with IT service management suites from CA, BMC, HP and IBM. It also counts customers such as Citigroup, Nissan and Scotiabank among its customers.

With release 3.0, StreamFoundry updated its Web-based user interface with Web 2.0 features and added a "Google-like" search capability. The company also added a configuration module that more directly links problem, change, incident and request management to drive speedier impact analysis. Updates reporting capabilities enable end users to include information on people in the configuration database to help associate IT components with specific end users. And this version is integrated with IBM Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager, which will help IT managers collect and reconciler configuration data from the entire enterprise into StreamFoundry's CMDB.

"We run on the mainframe, but our management capabilities address the entire enterprise environment," Heimlich says.

CMS 3.0 is available now. Typical implementations cost about $400,000.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.