Business Transaction Management Blog

There is more than one way to skin a cat

July 15, 2009 at 12:31 pm Ron Gidron 1 comment

I admit this idiom made me cringe the first time I heard it. Hebrew doesn’t have a similar idiom and maybe the fact that I was in Texas at the time also added to my shuddering. but the concept stuck with me and the broader context of the conversation I was having was actually about the value of BTM and the reality that there is more than one way to manage applications, handle new releases, plan for capacity and resolve performance issues. OpTier was competing with a traditional Application Performance Management (APM) vendor for some new customer business. The customer was particularly interested in improving the speed in which they are able to fix performance problems and recover from intermittent service interruptions. My Texan partner was worried about the fact that the competitor has shown the customer some impressive details about how their application server code was performing including method names, connection pool metrics and lots more techie details. They did not show transaction tracking capabilities but this customer has an established relationship with our competitor and my partner worried that it will only be too easy for them to sign a contract with an existing vendor instead of forming a new relationship with OpTier. “But what about the problem they have?” I asked how the relationship or level of detail is relevant to their objective of fixing performance issues quickly. “Well, there is more than one way to skin a cat” was the answer. This got me thinking immediately. after all it’s true, and I don’t know about the cat thing, but I accept that there are ways to find and even resolve performance issues without knowing much about the transactions and the users that execute them (all hands calls, log digging, profiling and correlating data from multiple places etc..) so the question begs: if it’s easier and a little cheaper for the customer to get an APM tool (aka  “deep dive” solution) from an existing vendor why should they invest in a BTM solution when their sole purpose is fixing performance issues?

The answer is efficiency; it is simply much more effective to deal with performance problems from the transaction perspective. it’s the best way to know what your end users were doing and where exactly things went bad, It completely eliminates the need for all hands calls and it is a lot simpler than digging through logs or correlating a ton of sophisticated metrics from multiple sources.

We decided to work together with them to see how we can translate this BTM efficiency into real gains that would justify BTM over the alternative. they had 6 critical applications that wanted to deploy on and the results they came up with were truly impressive.

They did the numbers, not us and their calculation pointed to a 70% reduction in expenses  directly tied to time and material relating to IT work on performance issues (using data from the last 12 months) – yes there are more ways than BTM to achieve their tasks but here was a clear indication of what the best way was, indubitably.

Yesterday I searched the web for an idiom that describes the best way to do something and couldn’t find it…. My colleague and fellow blogger  suggested “kill two badgers with one boomerang”… he’s not from Texas and I still don’t know of an idiom to describe the best way to do something and doesn’t include butchering anything but I know that come hell or high water BTM is the most effective way to deal with performance issues quickly.

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