NetIQ has introduced software the company says will help enterprise IT managers automate processes around network and security operations and distributed application performance management.

Aegis -- Greek for the shield of Zeus -- is a vendor-agnostic software platform designed to automate IT run books or other processes such as those laid out in ITIL, NetIQ says. The vendor, a subsidiary of Attachmate, developed Aegis in-house for the past few years to provide customers with a tool to model, automate, measure and improve IT operational efficiencies. NetIQ unveiled Aegis this week at Interop New York.

NetIQ says it built the company's experience with network, security and application management into the process and workflow elements of the software, but didn't base the platform on other NetIQ products such as AppManager. The software will integrate across a "broad array of IT tools" to trigger processes and automate tasks in various environments.

"We built our own intellectual property into the normalization layer and based the processes in part on ITIL," says Chris Pick, vice president of marketing at NetIQ.

The software includes three core components -- reconciliation/integration software, workflow/correlation technology and presentation/user interface tools -- that can be installed on one dedicated server or distributed across several servers for scalability. Aegis works with existing software agents installed in customer networks to collect data or kick of automated tasks.

Aegis competes with the iConclude technology Opsware acquired before being bought by HP, and RealOps, which was acquired by BMC earlier this year.

"Our competitors are at a disadvantage because now they are at the will of their parent companies focusing on internal products and not free to continue to develop their automation tools," Pick says.

NetIQ is currently developing adaptors from Aegis into popular management software applications from its own portfolio and from third-party vendors such as BMC, EMC and HP. The company expects to release adapters quarterly based on customer demand.

Aegis is scheduled to be available by the end of November, and a typical deployment of the software would cost approximately US$75,000.