Luminate shines free light on SAP

A maker of performance management tools for SAP's R/3 business software, Luminate will begin giving away for free next week the Luminate TimePiece, a response time analyzer for R/3. Similar software sells for about $10,000, according to Luminate.

For TimePiece, Luminate developers slapped a Web front end on network packet collection technology to let users view application response time by hour, by user, or by R/3 application server through a browser.

The tool allows systems managers to see R/3 application response times while network managers view traffic patterns by network segment. Over at the help desk, staff can verify response time problems and direct the issue to the appropriate IT group while administrators can determine whether response time problems are caused by the R/3 application or by network components.

According to AMR Research in Boston, the tool provides a subset of the capability found in other Luminate products and will be a plus for small installations. But, most likely, the giveaway "will be used to encourage new customers to acquire the complete Luminate toolset."

"It provides the raw information for determining where performance problems may be occurring, but does not provide the analysis and reporting tools necessary to support the large amounts of performance management data that occur in large deployments," AMR said in a recent report. But it does give users more than SAP's own performance management system, the Computer Center Management System (CCMS), and gives users a good hands-on feel for what else Luminate has to offer, AMR continued.

Users can register now for the software which will be available for download beginning Saturday.