Troubleshooting and Automated Deployments Now Made Simple

AUSTIN, Texas — April 7, 2008 — Phurnace Software, Inc., the Java application deployment company, today announced the addition of a new plug-in to its market leading Phurnace Deliver™ toolkit. The plug-in extends Phurnace’s powerful troubleshooting and configuration deployment features to the IBM WebSphere Portal application. The new capability will dramatically simplify the configuration, set-up and on-going maintenance of IBM WebSphere Portal based applications. Phurnace Deliver will enable IBM WebSphere Portal customers to migrate their Portal applications through their development, test, staging and production environments without the use of scripts or manual intervention.

With this new functionality, WebSphere Portal customers will be able to dramatically decrease time spent on configuration management as well as reducing the number of errors introduced from manual or script-based processes. Configuration and deployments are especially challenging to Portal customers due to both the number of configuration settings and the rate at which new applications are built in the Portal framework. Because of the ease of application development in the Portal framework, more applications with special configurations can quickly contribute to configuration drift and configuration bloat – which can create performance degradation or downtime. Phurnace Deliver is built to address those common IT issues.

Phurnace Deliver will have the ability to interrogate the Portal container and fully understand the hundreds of settings and configurations to enable rapid deployment. Phurnace Deliver will also provide problem troubleshooting and the ability to compare the configurations of different Portal environments to determine where and how they differ. In addition, Phurnace Deliver will be able to automatically set up a new Portal environment to roll out new releases, patches or updates. The optional, additional charge plug-in will be generally available in May.

“IBM WebSphere Portal is a powerful platform for interactive web applications, but it can present difficult maintenance challenges to an IT team” said Daniel Nelson, vp of products at Phurnace Software. “Phurnace solutions are targeted at the IT ops staff that must manage and deploy applications under difficult SLAs. Our new IBM Portal plug-in is built for them; we have simplified an arduous task.”

With Phurnace Deliver for IBM WebSphere Portal, customers will be able to:

• Migrate Portal based applications quickly and easily to the development, test, and production environments.
• Compare configurations across environments for faster and easier troubleshooting.
• Check-in configurations to their source code repositories for tracking, versioning, and change control.
• Eliminate configuration related errors caused by faulty scripts or manual processes.
• Preview changes to an environment before they are made.
• Roll back to a previous configuration in case of error.
• Leverage the native command line interface to have fully automated deployments without the creation of custom scripts.

“A secondary market of solutions has emerged around the IBM WebSphere Portal, showing its market leadership position” said Larry Warnock, president and ceo of Phurnace Software. “We have extended the features that we provide for IBM WebSphere up the stack to the IBM WebSphere Portal. This tool will help customers speed the deployment and simplify the maintenance of IBM Portal applications.”

About Phurnace Software, Inc.
Phurnace creates software that troubleshoots configuration problems and accelerates deployments of Java EE applications. It eliminates the error-prone, repetitive processes and headaches associated with troubleshooting, configuring, and migrating of software running on web application servers -- regardless of vendor or version. Developers and system administrators use Phurnace to eliminate errors, save time, and reduce overall deployment costs.

Phurnace and the Phurnace flame logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Phurnace Software, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other names are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.