The answer to all of these questions is “information,” said Richard Muirhead, CEO of Tideway, a New York-based software company with products that identify all the software – physical and virtual – within the data center.

“You have to know what you have and what you use to negotiate well, so understanding your environment pre- and post- virtualization is necessary to negotiate licenses,” Muirhead said. “We help people cut millions of dollars in costs in their data center by helping them find out what is already out there.”

Their newest product release, Tideway Foundation 7.2, is an automated discovery and application dependency mapping software that scans the data center continuously and tells the end user what is going on under the hood. It also lets IT analyze power consumption statistics for business applications, view their carbon footprint, and keeps end-of-life, unsupported software away from production.

“People usually don’t realize there is a product that gives this type of insight, so they muddle on as they always have…we have seen millions of dollars wasted on software licenses. One customer even had a million dollar server that they weren’t aware of that wasn’t being used,” Muirhead said.

According to Muirhead, users typically take about half a day to become proficient at using the software, which is deployed as a virtual appliance using the standard OVF format. The software is currently “optimized” for VMware, and will be supported for Hyper-V and XenServer later this year, Muirhead said.

Tideway’s software costs around $8-9 per server, per month, and a free community version, which can be applied to up to 30 servers, is available for download on their website. As for ROI, people typically see a 5X return within 90 days, Muirhead said. “It is very quick to deploy and cost effective.”

If you want to do some comparison shopping, other companies that offer application interdependency mapping software include IBM, BMC, CA, and Integrien.