State Street expects to upgrade to mValent Integrity soon, said Joseph Kennedy, State Street's vice president of IT. State Street wants to stay current with the product, since prior versions have reduced the time needed to debug new application configurations. State Street uses MValent software to monitor a variety of systems that affect its 19,000 employees, he said.

Kennedy said mValent has helped the financial services firm add scalability to its application infrastructure and resolve problems with configurations, something he called "invaluable." State Street has been able to expand the application environments it maintains without adding system administrators, he said.

MValent Integrity appears to be unique in the market, said two analysts, Jean-Pierre Garbanim at Forrester Research Inc. and Dennis Drogseth at Enterprise Management Associates.

Two companies offer products that are similar to mValent's offering: Relicore Inc. in Burlington, Mass., and Collation Inc. in Redwood City, Calif. But mValent seems to be unique because it focuses on the entire life cycle of managing applications, from predeployment into deployment, Drogseth said.