Company looks to help enterprises deal with alterations to systems A new product from mercury Interactive may provide IT managers with a big picture of systems changes and help them understand the impact of changes in an enterprise.Mercury Change Control Management is being unveiled Monday and will help users address unintended problems and conflicts caused by IT changes.“A Global 2000 company can have as many as 30,000 changes a day to its environment,” said Christopher Lochhead, Mercury’s chief marketing officer. Those changes might be planned, such as consolidating datacenters, or unplanned, such as a new version of Flash Player, Lochhead said.When conflicts occur, figuring out what changes are preventing an application from working is “an intergalactically hard problem,” Lochhead said.Mercury’s CMDB (Configuration Management Database) solves that problem with service dependency mapping and the capability of identifying the business risk of every request for change, according to Mercury. CMDB is based on technology from Appilog, which Mercury bought in 2004. For any configuration change, CMDB identifies applications and business services affected by the change.“You now have a single dashboard view of all changes from all the different silos,” said Simon Berman, senior director of products in Mercury’s application management group.“[CMDB] is somewhat unique [in] prioritizing changes specific to the application stack,” said Analyst Stephen Elliot, research manager and director of enterprise system management at IDC. “More IT organizations are organizing around service delivery models. You have to control change before you can deliver the service successfully,” Elliot said.Centralizing and prioritizing application changes gives IT managers better control, Elliot said.Shipping now, Mercury Change Control Management is priced at about $100,000 for an initial deployment. Software Development