mValent Survey Highlights Cost, Complexity
and Risks in Application Infrastructure

Waltham, MA – August 25, 2008 – mValent, Inc., a leading provider of application configuration management solutions, today announced the results of a survey of Fortune 1000 IT professionals conducted in July 2008.  The survey results yield deep insight into the challenges of managing the complex, multi-vendor layers of application infrastructure that support mission-critical business applications and services.  Within forty-eight hours, nearly 300 senior IT professionals responded, underscoring the top-of-mind nature and importance of these subjects.

Key survey findings include:

• Cost containment is thenumber one business objective for executives in IT in 2008, possibly reflecting general concerns about the macroeconomic climate. Nearly half of all respondents rate this as one of their Top Priorities for 2008.
• Ensuring high availability for mission-critical applications and business services is by far the most important initiative for Fortune 1000 IT organizations, according to nearly one-half of respondents, followed by initiatives focused on IT Audit and compliance per one-third of respondents.
• Configuration and change management in corporate America is a team sport: nearly half of Fortune 1000 companies employ more than 10 people to manage configuration changes to application infrastructure assets (application servers, Web servers, middleware, databases and operating systems).
• Each hour of application downtime costs Fortune 1000 companies in excess of $100,000, according to one-third of respondents at companies that track the business cost and impact. 
• While there is tremendous focus on virtualization as a solution to a number of IT problems, surprisingly, forty percent of respondents indicate that the trend to virtualization has either made their environments more complex (26.9%) or made no difference (13.4%) in the complexity.
• According to nearly forty-percent of respondents, the most important factor driving investment in automation tools in the application infrastructure is the need to enforce configuration consistency across multiple environments (e.g., Development, Staging, QA, Production).
• Installation and configuration of middleware assets and databases continues to be a “major time sink” for most IT teams.  About half of all respondents say that configuring these assets takes anywhere from six hours to more than a business day.

“Our survey results highlight the importance of reigning in the complexity in application infrastructure based on its high cost to the business,” said Jim Hickey, Chief Marketing Officer for mValent.  “The need for automated tools to manage all of the moving parts associated with the infrastructure that supports complex, distributed mission-critical business applications – Web servers, application servers, databases and middleware – is clear.”

For more details, interested parties can download the full survey results report at http://www.mvalent.com/News/2008_survey.asp

About mValent
mValent tackles IT complexity and compliance with automation software that eliminates configuration management chaos in application infrastructure. The company’s flagship product, mValent Integrity, automates application configuration management and is used by leading organizations to manage the build and maintenance of complex application configurations throughout their entire lifecycle – from development to production. The company was selected as one of Network World ‘s 2007 “10 Tech Start-ups That Should Matter.” mValent is located in Waltham, Massachusetts and is backed by top-tier venture capital firms, including Flybridge Capital Partners (formerly IDG Ventures) and Polaris Venture Partners.