Archive for October, 2009
Caveat Emptor
BTM solutions needs to be built as such from day one. Taking several single-platform monitoring tools and integrating them together will not achieve the same result as developing a multi-tier transaction monitoring solution from the ground up.
Continue Reading October 30, 2009 at 8:30 am Assaf Amit 1 comment
We still drive wood paneled station wagons
Every summer growing up, my family would take a one week vacation by car. That car was a long, green, wood paneled station wagon.
Before the trip my Dad would consult maps, plan the route and stops. The worst feature of the wagon was the frequent overheating. A dubious trait of its operator was, planning be damned, a penchant for getting lost. The “highlight” of these trips was the often hours spent in stopped traffic due to construction or on the side of the road, radiator spewing. I have very fond memories of these trips.
Today cars have power everything: A/C, satellite radio, GPS, Bluetooth, DVD players and TV’s! How different is a similar summer trip today? Cars are much more reliable. GPS navigation shouldn’t replace trip planning, but it certainly lessens the stress of remembering every turn (being a route “expert”) and most importantly can put you back on track quickly when a problem occurs (i.e. detour, missed turn).
So where are we now as computer users or professionals in IT? Many of us still end up “on the side of the road with the hood up” trying to address a computer problem, transaction problem or system wide outage. We are still at the point where we are not sure exactly what will happen when “Submit” gets hit.
But just like automotive technology, monitoring and management technology has improved over the years. However, many monitoring suites still have the feel of that same old wood paneled station wagon trying to pass as cutting edge by bolting on after-market modules. At some point, upgrading the next generation solution is the best way to go – a solution that was built from the ground up to include all “standard” enhancements as well as the most recent breakthroughs.
Imagine as an IT professional being able to view each user’s transactions – when they started, how long they took (or are taking), where they went or are going, and if there is a problem, being able to quickly localize the problem and get the transaction back on track. This enables a shift from worrying about whether a transaction will complete or have drastic variations in the time it takes, to managing cost, assuring security and delivering superior user experience. One day all of these capabilities will be delivered “standard.”
Business Transaction Management (BTM) is a big step forward in this area. BTM allows IT to provide users a better trip and to deliver more value to the business – all this without one having to be one part planner and architect and one part master mechanic. That doesn’t mean we won’t look back and remember the days of “all hands” calls with nostalgia.
BTM what is it for me?… really
While on my spinning bicycle in class this early morning on a cool New York day, I was cycling and grooving alon
g on Diana Ross “if there’s a cure for THIS, i don’t want it”….. Being thankful I have time to do things I love. It reminded me of discussion I had with people working in IT multiple times; we IT have it though there is very little time for personal life:
we know our users are complaining, we know we are losing business, we have been trying to identify the issue for days, I am losing credibility, I missed several friends dinner, I work every weekends, I have to leave the office now because I have to jump on a change management conference call while driving with the kids screaming in the back of the car. I have other things on my plate, like launching our new private banking services, budgeting for new servers to address our merger with ABC company, I need to grow my business, we can’t even have a feel on how our services behave nor identifying simple problem such as one out of five times the browser hangs when entering employee badge number. The assumption I made last week on where the problem might have been are now wrong, the change management team applied a patch against that specific application and the problem didn’t go away. I am stress and tired…. I am stress and tired…. I am stress and tired…. I am stress and tired….
IT experts would say: “I have tools several, several, several, several tools, and it is true after triaging all the alerts, the tools were able to isolate issues but I really just care about what impacted my users in company ABC. What is the behavior of my most revenue generating transactions today and what will it be after we merge the two companies’ systems next week, how would I know if it improves or degrades the overall business service?”Familiar with THIS? What if you would take a peek at introducing Business Transaction Management (BTM) into your IT process?
You would finally see at this moment the IT consumers and IT producers of business transaction information, knowing whom and what is impacted, focusing only on the most important services. What if you knew the exact flow of the information and the behavior of your special revenue generating credit card application transactions? BTM is a source of rich IT information. It is much more than incident management, you can not only understand the current behavior and plan for growing your business you can see the impact on your services of an unplanned or planned change.
This is the cure to resolve the “THIS”, today, tomorrow, next week, on a constantly changing fluid IT environment. Really who could have predicted that you would transact business via text messages? With this information on hand feel free to use those specialized tools and apply them appropriately to isolate granular application components issues but change the way you think about managing IT, It is not always about technical components. Now, I won’t cure all your stress and fatigue as there always be screaming kids, traffic, lines at the coffee shop but one less thing to worry about, getting a little more of your personal life back, one more thing to proudly walk to your management and really feeling good that you know the “THIS” at every moment of the day and I guarantee you will be grooving along a Disco song….
What’s Clear About Net Neutrality
By Russell Rothstein
October 12, 2009
The debate going on in Washington and the blogosphere around Net Neutrality is reaching fever pitch. If you haven’t been following the issue (no doubt due to spending too much time following your local gas station on twitter), it boils down to whether ISPs have the right to control what flows over their pipes or whether Internet users have the right to get unencumbered access to anything out on the Net. We’re especially intrigued by the debate going on in the Network World blogs between Johna Till Johnson and the dynamic duo of Sevcik and Wetzel. (Disclaimer: OpTier is a member of the Apdex alliance led by Peter Sevcik.)
Which brings us to our point that we can’t wait until someone buys the assets of Clear Corporate and restores the service. Clear is the company that created the speedy security lanes in the airport for those of us who hate to stand in long lines. Bidding is currently on to buy Clear’s assets from Morgan Stanley who took possession of the company when it went bust. (Note to our CFO: Don’t use money invested by Morgan Stanley in OpTier to make bid for Clear.)
You may be asking what Net Neutrality has to do with Clear. The answer, of course, is prioritization. Prioritization of data flowing over the network. Priority of people in airport security lines (very busy and important businesspeople, mind you). We here at OpTier think a lot about prioritization – prioritization of troubleshooting activities when outages occur, prioritization of infrastructure spending to maintain service levels, prioritization of virtualization deployments, and in general, prioritization of IT management in order to best support the goals of the business.
We believe prioritization is at the heart of the BTM approach and that’s what sets OpTier apart from the traditional APM vendors, even as they start to talk about business transactions in their pitches. While these vendors are cobbling together a group of silo monitoring tools using correlation techniques, we believe that true BTM means complete visibility into how every single business transaction executes from the end-user across all IT components with a complete breakdown of latency, resource consumption and SLA compliance.
Now that’s even worth waiting in line for.
October 12, 2009 at 8:57 am Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
Another “Less is More” Blog for ITSM and BSM Solutions
I’m jealous and in denial with several of my colleagues at work. It may have the “compare the meerkat” ring tone but my mobile phone was replaced last week with a new model of berry and I have to report I still feel inferior. It’s like I just traded a Porsche Boxster for a Boxster S, sure it’s a nice upgrade but everything is relative and unfortunately everyone around me is driving a 911 Turbo at the moment in the form of an iPhone.
Still, I’m not bitter. I think the introduction and innovation of the iPhone was exactly the kick up the ass that the mobile phone market needed. Think different is what Apple did and I think many IT vendors today should be following the same type of attitude for IT service management solutions. If I rewind the clock back just 5 years I owned a Sony Ericsson phone to make calls, a canon 2MegaPixel camera to take photos, an iPod “brick edition” to listen to music and a Dell laptop (also Brick Edition) to surf the web and do email. Today, I can get all that from an iPhone. The good news according to all my smug friends is that this iPhone thing actually works and is also quite sexy or something. The fact the camera, ipod, phone and browser are all integrated into the handset with an intuitive user interface is what is most impressive. If I owned an iPhone I wouldn’t need to buy 4 products from 4 different vendors.
ITSM & BSM - Lots of pieces integrated but not the picture you expected.
Now try comparing with what I just said against the IT service management landscape today. Customers are buying ten to twenty point products to manage the different functions and components of IT. Most of which were never intended to work with each other from day one and have so many customisations that migrating to new versions is like moving house rather than redecorating the one you already own. Customers buy separate tools to manage end users, networks, servers, JVM’s, CLR’s, databases, storage and that is just a short list. That’s a lot of GUI, in fact that’s a lot of user logins and products to physically deploy, train and support across your IT organisation. And yet so often we hear the words “Less is More” used in conversation and sales pitches despite many vendors being responsible for most of this huge complexity in the first place. The key issue isn’t so much the number of products, it’s the way in which real users can navigate and perform real use cases to exploit the information across multiple products so they can manage IT more effectively. Dashboards in my opinion do not solve this issue, they provide a quick fix and band aid which is often used by a sales team to try and promote “single pane of glass” views and “OOTB integration” yet in reality dashboards often limit navigation and task orientated use cases where you need to go from high level to low level data using a common context.
We announced a new product at OpTier last week which helps customers understand and manage their end user experience. Rather than create a new standalone product we listened to customers right from the start and did what they asked. We built the new product using the same framework we used to build our first product CoreFirst. Customers get all the benefits and features of a new product but they get it without all the drawbacks of buying yet another product to manage their IT services and components. They have a single GUI, a single data repository and a single user login to access both our products. Customers now get visibility of their end user experience with a complete profile of the business transactions that constructed those experiences all in a single click. We hid the technical complexity just like Apple did with the iPhone and on top of the integration we also decided to make the GUI more sexy in the process.
I may not own an iPhone but that doesn’t stop me appreciating what can be learnt from such innovation.
Experiencing IT
I’ve been in IT for longer than I care to admit.
This week, as we were putting the final touches on the exciting launch of our new Experience Manger product I had a recollection from the “beginning of time”. It was more than 20 odd years ago, and I was given ownership of the main logistics and maintenance operations management application for the Navy shipyards. No, not an SAP module – this is pre SAP times, and not a interactive application even. It was a batch application and users in the shipyards would feed it with information about planned and on-going production, maintenance and repair work on a daily basis by filling in data cards, to be punched in by “data processing clerks”. Our Main Frame COBOL programs would do their magic overnight and issue a set of reports that would be FACed to the yards (No, not FAXed – FACed as in “get them out with the First Available Courier). Nifty things could be done with these reports like identifying critical project paths, forecasted delays and applying workforce optimization. We were very proud of the smart code that produced them.
On my first day in my new role as the application owner I get a call from my chief customer, the guy who runs ops in shipyards. He cordially invites me over to visit, “I want you to come see how your stuff is used in the field”. Next thing I knew, I had a protective helmet and gloves on and was spending a day with the hardened men of the shipyard in the belly of submarines, metal workshops, and on the deck of the patrol ships being quality inspected for battle readiness. Everywhere I looked the input forms for our application and the output report cutouts were hung, and in the ops office planning officers were huddled around the planning charts produced the night before. They talked to me about application changes they need and about being able to update during the work day and to get reports on demand, and they repeatedly reminded me of the time when the reports did not arrive in the morning and work was halted, and when data was missing from the reports because it had not made it into the night run. They gave me a taste for what it feels like to be a customer of our applications and felt it was the very first thing they needed to do to make me a better partner.
Fast forward to today’s reality: the essentials have not changed – the most important thing IT professionals do is still putting business enabling products in the hands of our customers – the business users. And these products still have to work again and again and again for each and every user and continuously improve. A primary concern of IT professionals will always be a true and deep understanding of those users and the ways in which they use business enabling IT services.
20 years after MF batch heydays, we are fortunate to live in an era when understanding how users experience IT services does not require taking a ride to the shipyards or visiting the online consumer’s home. And as the underlying technology has evolved to be far more complex than those early COBOL days so has the focus on the quality of experience.
On this day of the launch of our Experience Manager product it feels great to take a part in making the IT experience a better one for all involved – the users consuming the services and the IT professionals providing them.
OpTier
Assaf Amit
Andy Wetzel
Russell Rothstein
Motti Tal
Linh C. Ho
Diego Lomanto
