management software, today announced significant enhancements to its suite of Experience and Performance Management solutions for enterprise applications.

With Version 5.0, Knoa delivers the industry’s first extensible end-user monitoring platform that not only underpins the company’s flagship product, Knoa Experience and Performance Manager (EPM), but also can support a portfolio of unique solutions for any number of corporate stakeholders with a need for end-user metrics and management. “The priorities for our 5.0 release were driven by the needs of our customers, including six of the Fortune 50, who are experiencing a dramatic increase in the need for visibility at the end-user level to support a diversity of management objectives, ranging from IT’s standing mandate to provide available and responsive applications, to the growing need to manage end-user application usage, to the CFO’s requirement to ensure compliant process execution,” said Thad Eidman, CEO of Knoa Software. “Version 5.0 of Knoa’s Universal User Monitoring Platform signals the end of the need for a plethora of point monitoring solutions that our customers have struggled to deploy, integrate and manage to capture the requisite visibility of end-user experience and performance.”

Knoa’s universal end-user monitoring platform is comprised of the following elements:

• A passive monitoring agent with the capability to collect any and all data about end-user experience, behavior and performance when using corporate software applications. Version 5.0 delivers an expanded sensing technology to support targeted field-level monitoring for root cause analysis, security, and compliance monitoring.
• A library of solution-specific templates that delineate the data collection targets for different applications to ensure that data collection and transmission remain efficient.
• A data aggregation and modeling engine that transforms raw metrics into actionable insights. Decoupling data analysis and modeling from data presentation is the technology enabler to provide scalable analysis by application, role, business process and management objective.
• A data presentation layer, the Knoa Performance Management Console that can provide specific views of the aggregated data for specific stakeholder roles within the organization. Version 5.0 introduces an Extensible Reporting Framework which allows new report definitions to be created and deployed without any code changes or a need to upgrade the Performance Management Console. Also, with Version 5.0, Knoa now offers multi-language support for the console user interface.
• An Open API framework to support out-of-box integration with relevant legacy system and application management products.

Knoa was listed as an industry leader in end-user monitoring capabilities in the recent Forrester Research report “The Forrester Wave: Passive Agent End User Experience Monitoring,” of Sept. 27, 2007, which noted Knoa’s solution in this market is grounded in its vision of fulfilling all the end-user experience measurement needs of IT organizations. The report also cited Knoa’s solution as more mature than its peers’ offerings. “With this new release, Knoa continues to raise the bar in user experience management,” said Eidman. “By providing our customers greater insight into application, end-user and business performance metrics, we expand our leadership position with innovation that keeps generating industry firsts, and customer value.”

Available today, Version 5.0 of Knoa Experience and Performance Manager(EPM) provides total monitoring coverage of end-user behavior and experience across enterprise applications, such as SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Siebel CRM, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft Enterprise Suite, as well as other major application vendors or large in-house legacy applications. Knoa EPM monitors application execution from the perspective of the end-user, and provides precise metrics about the user experience as well as measurements on how effectively people execute when using enterprise applications. Knoa provides the most accurate metrics possible on the performance of the application from the end-user perspective, and delivers an unprecedented level of visibility into the actual performance of the end-users.

Version 5.0 of Knoa EPM delivers the first of Knoa’s role-based performance management consoles. The new version offers four console business roles: IT Support, User Support, Manager, and Training. The new role-based Dashboards are interactive, aggregate views of the Knoa performance data, driven by the unique informational needs and processes of the different roles. Based upon their role, authorized users have access to summary reports of all performance metrics, application and timeframe filters, Flash-based charts of daily performance trends and other key data for revealing and resolving application issues. Version 5.0 also offers extended support for group-level reporting. Customers have the ability to define up to 20 custom user attributes for the monitored users and expose those attributes in the Knoa Console, for benchmarking performance at the group level.

“This architecture of Knoa’s Universal User Monitoring Platform enables tremendous scalability in our portfolio of targeted end-user management solutions,” said Eidman, “In 2008, our release of new products will come at a very fast pace. In many cases, these individual products will have as much functionality as entire companies in our space today. This is the power of the single universal user platform technology that we have developed. With Version 5.0, Knoa has delivered a product that is capable of providing one version of the truth that will enable all functions within a business to work together to drive productivity and operational excellence.”

About Knoa
Knoa® Software is leading the performance management industry with end-user experience monitoring 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 is headquartered in New York, NY.