Business Transaction Management Blog

When I am presenting BTM to a new audience, they commonly ask “How is this different than all of the monitoring tools that we already own?”  Some say “We can already do some of this today with our existing tools.”  Many prospects still remain skeptical after value based presentations, demos, use cases and ROI statements.  However, there is one moment when the lights come on, when prospects clearly see the power and uniqueness of BTM.  This is what I call the “Aha” moment of BTM.  What is this aha moment? When does it happen and why?

The aha moment occurs when a prospect or customer first sees the auto-discovered topology of their own business transactions.  They now have visibility they never had before.  They know where the transactions went.   They understand fully what is meant by “transaction tracing.”  They can see the overall topology – all business applications and transactions, or a specific transaction such as “Policy approval,” as well as see individual transaction instances.

This new visibility is powerful for the information it provides, but the aha moment wouldn’t happen if it required transaction modeling or data definitions to generate the views.  The fact that the transaction topologies are discovered automatically is key to the epiphany. The additional value of capturing the business context of each transaction, the roundtrip and segmented response times, as well as resource consumption finally leads to the statements: “Wow, now I get it – this is BTM.  There’s no way I can get this information today. This is the view I really need.”

So why do prospects need to see BTM working live before fully appreciating it?  I think this is due to the fact that most people in IT have heard the transaction tracing story before.  Either they’ve tried to do it themselves via a coordinated development effort or they have tried to integrate a suite of products together – none of which was designed to do BTM.  So now they’re skeptical and gun shy.  Seeing the automatic discovery of transaction topology and flow changes this.

For now this initial challenge will remain.  It may be a while until there is a better answer to the questions and doubts than: “Please trust me.  Let me show you how BTM works with your own transactions.  Seeing is believing.”