"We've packaged the entire Precise platform and encapsulated it in an appliance," said Zohar Gilad, Precise executive vice president. "Typically, within 30 minutes you can have the entire Precise platform up and running. "

The Precise Virtual Appliance is embedded in a VMware-based virtual machine. Users just download the software to a server, start the virtual machine and point it to the specific network. There is no need to provision and configure a new server for the application.

The package includes not only the basic application, but also the server software and the database of application profiles.

"IT doesn't need to provision the machine, the database and everything else," Gilad said. Gilad noted that, within a large and bureaucratically bound organization, it can sometimes take an IT staff weeks or longer to provision a server and associated software.

Precise is one of a number of companies offering APM products, or software that in day-to-day operations. Precise's software monitors the overall performance of applications and can offer pointers on where to find problems and how to fix them. The software watches most of the potential trouble spots: the user's client software, the application server, the database and even the storage back-end.