IT change management software specialist Tripwire has revealed plans to enhance its configuration monitoring and testing capabilities with the launch later this year of a series of new configuration management tools.

The revelations, which come on the same day as the vendor gave a UK launch to the latest version of its flagship change auditing software Tripwire Enterprise, confirm that the company is keen to expand its portfolio into the broader IT governance space.

Rob Warmack, vice president of product marketing at Tripwire, said that while the company now had a strong solution for auditing and managing IT changes, it needed to enhance its ability to audit "data at rest" within the IT environment. He added that the company would launch a range of new tools and modules to tackle this problem "later this year".

"Configuration auditing has two dimensions: change auditing and auditing the data at rest," he explained. "Firms need to be able to check the configuration at rest to ensure that the changes you undertake do not make you non-compliant. The configuration management database (CMDB) needs this information to remain effective."

Warmack said that while Tripwire had some capabilities in this area, it was keen to add functionality for testing IT configuration, managing the policies governing multiple configuration tests and reports, and integrating with firm's CMDBs so they can ensure IT configurations are compliant with internal and external requirements.

He added that these capabilities would deliver firms "time and dollar savings " because they would provide automated proof that firms are compliant and also help limit "configuration creep" - where IT changes mean administrators gradually lose track of the state of their systems resulting in more downtime and slower response times.

Separately, the vendor today bolstered its change management capabilities wi th the addition of new IT change control functionality to the latest edition of Tripwire Enterprise.

Warmack said Enterprise 6.0, which was launched in the US last week, now features new change filtering capabilities for detecting unauthorised system changes. Firms can set policies defining what types of changes are unapproved and the system then filters all configuration changes and flags up those that do not meet the criteria.

Andi Mann, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates, said in a statement that the new functionality would help reduce downtime and non-compliance by highlighting the unauthorised changes that are most commonly at the root of system faults.

The suite also allows IT managers to automate some of their response to unauthorised changes, according to Warmack. "You can add logic to the response, so that if an unauthorised change is not investigated by an administrator within two hours, for example, notification is escalated to the IT manager," he said.

The new suite also features new support for Microsoft SQL Server databases, HP-UX 11 on Itanium and a range of new operating systems, Warmack said.