VIENNA, Va., Oct. 9, 2007 -- StackSafe, Inc., a provider of pre- production staging and testing solutions for IT operations teams, today announced the findings of its IT Ops Research Report: Change Management Maturity -- revealing that while many companies display some characteristics of Change Management Maturity, most can still improve a great deal. The study of over 400 IT operations professionals, conducted by Research Edge, Inc., an independent, third-party research firm, also shows five key areas that can be attributed to a company's change management maturity level. Each of these maturity factors is measured against key business benefits to assess its impact and show a company's potential room for growth. The full report can be found at http://www.stacksafe.com/research.

Improving change management maturity represents a key need for companies of all sizes according to the study. When companies display a difficulty in implementing changes they often face production problems: increased staff demands, emergency changes, decreased confidence in future changes, and an overall difficulty with the change management process. All of these problems contribute to company downtime and its ability to remain productive.

The report identifies that nearly a quarter of all changes go bad, with over half of all respondents citing unforeseen interaction between systems and insufficient pre-production testing as reasons why changes cause problems in production. Companies with the highest maturity level made automated changes at weekly intervals and possessed a strong testing program that could test against the entire stack.

"This study clearly shows that being able to test and predict how software infrastructure changes are going to affect existing IT services can greatly reduce costly failures," said Loren Burnett, President and CEO of StackSafe. "We can clearly see as companies raise their change management maturity they have fewer and fewer problems with implementing changes in their environments. As companies institute more changes, they need to safely evaluate the risk that these updates could represent for their key business applications."

According to Gartner, "Improving change management processes is one of the best investments that enterprises can make, because availability (reduction in unplanned downtime) can increase by 25% to 35%, and even more so in the reduction of planned downtime (through effective policies and scheduling)."(1)

The report documents and analyzes the five ways to increase a company's Change Management Maturity. To most dramatically increase positive business impact, companies should focus on two activities:

1. Invest in automating change management

2. Regularly schedule changes

Additionally, thorough testing and the adoption of change management best practices can also drive stronger business impact from change management. Three activities will help companies in these areas:

1. Maintain a staging environment for IT operation testing

2. Test changes across the entire stack before making them in production

3. Adopt a process best practice such as ITIL

About the Study:

Research Edge recruited and screened 400 respondents who were asked to complete a 30 minute web-based survey. A sample size of 400 provides an error margin of +/- 5% at a 95% level of confidence. Respondents verified company size, job position, industry, scope of IT decision making, etc. and were screened against the following criteria:

-- Work for a company that employs over 750 employees

-- Hold position of IT operations managers and/or responsible for IT operations

-- Support multi-tier applications as part of daily position

About StackSafe, Inc.

StackSafe has developed a patent-pending software platform to meet an immediate need within the IT operations market for pre-production testing and analysis solutions. Capable of revolutionizing the way organizations introduce changes into their complex, multi-tier IT operations environments, the StackSafe(TM) solution is an easy-to-deploy, virtualized, pre-production platform that enables organizations to understand the business impact of changes across the business application stack. The company is developing its flagship software for general availability in late 2007. StackSafe was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Vienna, Virginia.

For additional information please visit http://www.stacksafe.com.

About Research Edge, Inc.

Research Edge is a custom research firm that applies cutting edge techniques and innovative thinking to solve complex business problems. With a focus on business-to-business research in the IT sector, Research Edge works with leaders in all facets of IT software, hardware and services. As a full service firm with worldwide coverage, Research Edge partners have 20+ years of experience with quantitative and qualitative research. Research Edge was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Portland, Oregon.

For additional information, please visit http://www.rsedge.com.

(1) Architecting for 24x7 Availability, Donna Scott, June 11-13 2007. Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit.

SOURCE StackSafe, Inc.