NEW YORK, November 4, 2009 - Knoa Software, the leading provider of end-user experience and performance management software, today announced the availability Knoa Virtual/Cloud Experience Manager (VCEM). Knoa VCEM is the first truly 'off-the-shelf' product that monitors and manages real end-user experience for enterprise applications that are running in virtualized environments, delivered via SaaS, or provisioned via Cloud Computing.

All of these non-traditional delivery models represent a significant disruption in the provisioning model for the infrastructure on which applications run. In many cases, the benefits of increased agility, reduced costs and sustainability are lost as the new provisioning paradigms introduce business risk. Forrester Research Inc. reports that "most enterprises seem to have taken a very cautious attitude toward 'virtualizating' their critical applications. Virtualization poses a new series of management problems that require resolution within the existing framework of IT management. When a satisfactory answer is provided, the economic value of the technology will become clearer and have a significant impact on enterprise critical applications."

Knoa's flagship product, Experience and Performance Manager (EPM) has been widely recognized as the industry's most innovative end-user experience monitoring solution, in part, because it is the only end-user monitoring product that simultaneously meets the user performance needs of the business and the end-user experience needs of the IT organization.

Knoa VCEM extends this concept to the worlds of SaaS, Virtualization and Cloud Computing with a streamlined, turnkey application designed specifically to support the management needs of the IT Operations team changing the provisioning model for business critical applications like SAP, Oracle EBS, Oracle Siebel and Microsoft Outlook.

"IT organizations are under tremendous pressure to continue to deliver the hard dollar ROI and operational agility benefits that come from virtualizing servers. Most large enterprises have virtualized their 'low hanging fruit' and must now turn to business critical 'tier 1' applications to deliver the next rounds of these benefits to their organizations," said Bernd Harzog, lead analyst - Virtualization Performance and Capacity Management, The Virtualization Practice. "However, many IT operations teams are finding resistance from applications owners due to perceived uncertainty on the part of the applications owners as to how their application will perform on a shared virtual infrastructure."

Knoa VCEM is designed to mitigate the inherent risk to business continuity that any disruption to the back-end infrastructure raises, especially with the following capabilities:

• Dynamic Benchmarking, which enables the IT organization to compare system performance prior to the change with system performance before and after each change in the back-end infrastructure. Dynamic Benchmarking is available for all system performance metrics including transaction response times, system errors and utilization.
• Comprehensive Threshold Alerting, which allows IT organizations to create and manage alerts based upon established Service Level Agreements (SLA). Alerts can be delivered via email or integrated into existing performance management consoles to provide the IT team with a "single pane of glass" for performance management.
• Dynamic Base-lining, which allows the IT organization to monitor when any performance metric (response time, quality or utilization) varies from short or long-term trends. Dynamic base-lining directly attacks the difficult issue of ensuring minimal performance degradation for the thousands of transactions for which meaningful SLA thresholds have not yet been set.
• Advance Root Cause Analysis, which allows the IT Operations team to evaluate the impact of end-user behavior and desktop resources and conditions on any performance anomaly. This is available as an additional capability.

Knoa VCEM leverages Knoa's Universal Client Agent, a passive desktop agent, to capture its performance metrics. "With current trends in application methodologies (SOA, RIA) and infrastructure options (Cloud Computing, Virtualization, SaaS), it's become increasingly clear that the only relevant measurement point for any and all performance metrics is the end-user's desktop. You simply can't do it from anywhere else, period," said Lori Wizdo, vice president, Marketing, Knoa Software. "End-user monitoring provides one version of the truth so IT teams can identify real problems in real-time and can completely eliminate the impact of user perceptions about application performance. The end-result is a seamless transition to the back-end operational model that offers the enterprise increased agility, reduced costs and sustainability."

About Knoa
Knoa® Software is leading the performance management industry with end-user experience management solutions that reach beyond infrastructure and application performance to monitor, measure and manage how end-users are utilizing the application to optimize business process execution. Knoa customers not only know if core enterprise applications are delivering an acceptable user experience, but also, if application users are executing key processes effectively and efficiently - the key to achieving business value and ROI. Knoa was recently selected by Gartner as a "Cool Vendor", for its capabilities in end-user experience and performance management and was listed as a Leader in the "Forrester Wave: Passive Agent End User Experience Monitoring". Knoa is headquartered in New York, NY. For more information about Knoa, please visit www.knoa.com.

Editorial Contacts:

Mike Sullivan PAN Communications 978.474.1900 knoa@pancomm.com

Note: Knoa is a registered trademark. All other company and product names contained herein are the marks of their respective holders.