Tideway is also announcing the most flexible solution available for the discovery and mapping of bespoke elements within IT environments, a critical function to gaining a truly comprehensive view of enterprise infrastructures.

Tideway's Customer Advisory Board delivers strategic counsel and perspective on product and solution development, and ensures that the company's vision and product roadmap meet customer needs through pragmatic solutions and industry best practice. Current members of the Tideway Customer Advisory Board include: John O'Hara, Distinguished Engineer, JPMorgan Chase Investment Bank; Simon Post, out-going Group IT Director of BSkyB and incoming CTO at Carphone Warehouse, Kevin Poulter, Application Technology Manager at British American Tobacco and Stephen Ashton, Global Head of Business Management at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.

"Tideway Systems is delivering innovative and timely technology to help address the challenges facing IT operations today – meeting adoption curves, managing service levels and answering to growing regulatory and governance requirements. We believe Tideway have become experts in their field, delivering the means to clarify complex system issues, and have grown from their close collaboration with their lead customers," said Stephen Ashton. "I am happy to be part of Tideway Systems' Customer Advisory Board as they build their leadership position within this developing market."

The Customer Advisory Board's strategic input to date has resulted in a set of unique features in Tideway's latest release of its flagship product – Foundation 4.11. This release extends Foundation's knowledge library to recognize more than 2500 commercial hardware and software infrastructure products. In addition it adds the ability to model specific customer environments flexibly – essential for most Fortune 500 companies who are reliant on bespoke applications.

Some of the enhancements included are:

Expanded Knowledge Library – allows Foundation 4.11 to recognize over 2500 commercial hardware and software infrastructure products out of the box, including product lifecycle information. This reduces the manual effort required to populate and maintain a CMDB, speeding time to value significantly.

Deeper version identification – provides more techniques to extract version information. This data can be used to enforce IT policy, reducing operational risk by eliminating unsupported or end-of-life products in the environment

Business application modeling – new wizards to simplify the modeling of complex distributed business applications. This provides clear visibility of how the IT infrastructure supports the business – essential for compliance reporting.

Extensible configuration management database – provides the ability to adapt Foundation's best practice model of the IT universe to reflect the customer's environment precisely. This allows seamless integration between Foundation and existing enterprise management tools.

As a result of the flexibility provided by the new features within Tideway Foundation 4.11, organisations can meet the tight regulatory compliance reporting deadlines demanded by Sarbanes Oxley, FSA and the SEC amongst others. The reporting requirements are often costly and sometimes impossible to meet through manual means, due to the extensive resource and time demands.