BMC's new products will link mainframe and batch-operations management processes to asset discovery and distributed transaction management capabilities, said Jean-Pierre Garbani, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

That will enable systems administrators to look at how an entire application is functioning, Garbani said. He added that the promised integration is particularly important for IT staffers in markets such as finance and insurance, where mainframes are still a key back-end component of many applications.

"For way too long, there has been a disconnect between distributed and mainframe management solutions," said Rich Ptak, an analyst at Ptak, Noel & Associates in Amherst, N.H. "Mostly, [vendors] have been trying to patch over the disconnect. That approach is inelegant and, in the end, not satisfactory."

BMC also said it plans in the fall to upgrade its Mainview Transaction Analyzer software, which is designed to pinpoint problems in transactions, with support for IBM's WebSphere MQ messaging middleware technology. Support for the WebSphere application server is due to follow next year, BMC said.

Other tools announced by the company Monday provide new backup and recovery capabilities for IMS databases as well as added security for DB2 databases, including up to 128-bit encryption for image-copy data being transported to off-site locations, BMC said.