Business Transaction Management Blog

“Buyer beware” — a legal doctrine under which the buyer of goods assumes full risk for the quality of the goods.

When we started working on a BTM solution back in 2003, there was no market yet for business transaction management. The very premise of needing to start managing the business transactions, on top of all the other things that were already being managed by IT, was questioned by many. We worked hard to demonstrate that even with all the existing monitoring tools in place, IT organizations had a huge visibility gap that prevented them from aligning their activities with business needs and resolving problems quickly and efficiently.

A common question that we were asked back then was who our competitors were. Our answer was that no one else was offering something similar to our solution. On one hand, I was proud to be able to offer something that no one else was smart enough to be offering, but on the other hand there was always that lingering doubt – if no one else was in BTM, was it because no one really needed it?

The years went by, and a growing number of customers along with the encouragement of industry analysts made it very clear that the complex transaction flows in large heterogeneous environments demand a new class of management solutions. The need for business transaction management has been officially validated.

As a side-effect of getting market validation for our solution, we’re now facing the opposite phenomena to the one we witnessed in our early days. Many of the large software vendors as well as some smaller ones have jumped on the BTM bandwagon and are claiming to have a solution for end-to-end monitoring of all business transactions in complex IT environments. Few of these vendors actually developed new code. The others have mostly repackaged their existing assets, which are typically able to provide some level of visibility into a platform like a message bus or an application server, and are now claiming that it can provide the holistic end-to-end view of all business transactions. Today, when we present our solution to prospects, they no longer say BTM is a new concept that they need some time to digest – quite often they will say that they’ve heard the same pitch before and want to understand how we are different. No longer having to prove there is a real need for our solution, we now have to differentiate ourselves from a dozen vendors whose marketing slides claim they can deliver on the BTM promise.

Abraham Lincoln once asked how many legs a dog has if you call the tail a leg. The answer, he explained, was four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg. In my six years of being involved in technical BTM sales, if I learned one thing it is that the only way to build a BTM solution is from the ground up. Taking your old Java profiling tool and bundling it with a database plug-in and a network sniffer doesn’t make it a BTM solution and will not be able to deal with the problems that BTM solves in Production environments. You can call it BTM and claim that it can show end-to-end transaction flows 24×7 in Production, but to paraphrase Honest Abe, simply calling it BTM doesn’t make it so.

Dear reader: If you are one of the IT professionals who are evaluating BTM solutions and having a hard time telling them apart, start by checking which solution evolved from a single-tier monitor and which was built for BTM from day one. Compare the platform coverage matrices, and take the time to verify each vendor’s claimed abilities to auto-discover and show complex business flows with many different protocols inside and outside of the data center. One of the nicer aspects of BTM is that you should see its value right away, literally a few hours after you install. If a tool can only show you parts of your topology, or requires you to install several different products and integrate them together, then it is probably not a BTM solution. Buyer, beware! The slides of many vendors may look alike, but only a few have real BTM technology as well as the expertise required to get it implemented in a way that will deliver on the true promise of business transaction management.