CoreFirst Cops Product of the Year Award

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datamation product of the year awards The category may be new, but the winner is no stranger to Datamation’s Product of the Year Awards.

CoreFirst, the transaction management platform and flagship product of New York-based OpTier Inc., was a landslide victor in the Business/IT Alignment Software category of the Datamation Product of the Year 2007 Awards.

With more than three times the votes of the other finalists combined, CoreFirst dominated the first-time category, which also included runner-up Oracle’s Business Intelligence Suite; Duet, the Microsoft and SAP collaboration; and SAS’s Model Manager.

It is the second consecutive year that OpTier’s CoreFirst has won a Datamation award. In 2006, the 1.4 version of the product topped the Network & Systems Management category.

CoreFirst is designed to ensure that IT maintains business service levels and optimizes resources across the enterprise. The software detects and records transactions across an enterprise and creates an IT business service map.

One of OpTier’s customers is TrueCredit, a subsidiary of credit-reporting giant TransUnion. TrueCredit’s processing systems became burdened several years ago after the federal Credit Act caused an explosion in customer requests for their credit reports. Seeking a way to handle the increased demand, the company turned to CoreFirst.

Julie Craig is a senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates, an IT management consulting firm based in Boulder, Colo., which wrote a
case study for OpTier about TrueCredit’s experience with the transaction processing platform.

According to Craig, CoreFirst provides an important link to TrueCredit’s business through the software’s “ability to prioritize and re-prioritize batch jobs based on criticality to the business, while still meeting agreed-upon Service Level Agreements.”

“In mainframe environments, this can result in considerable cost savings, as hardware upgrades can be postponed or potentially eliminated by making better use of the resources that are available,” Craig says. “It saves money for the business while still providing high-quality service.”

Another CoreFirst customer is Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota. According to Dave Thomas, director of technology support for the organization, CoreFirst has helped IT “speed up diagnostics and resolution” since initial implementation nearly a year ago.

“It’s giving us a view of our environment we just didn’t have before, both from a transactional level and in response time across the tiers,” Thomas said.

CoreFirst 2.0, released last October, includes enhanced reporting and monitoring features that, according to OpTier, “allow application managers, service managers and operations teams the ability to generate a greater number of comprehensive reports that
provide detailed comparisons of transactions by tier, network origin, class, performance and period.”

Motti Tal, executive vice president of marketing and business development for OpTier, says CoreFirst is ideal for transaction-heavy industries such as e-banking and retail supply chain. But, he adds, “All industries are interested in better service levels at lower costs.”

CoreFirst costs $3,000 per CPU, while pricing per application starts at $100,000. It is available for Unix, Linux and Windows.