Business Transaction Management Blog

iBTM – Business Transaction Management for the iPhone

By Anonymous, 28th October 2010.

Those of you who read my “Another less is more blog for ITSM and BSM solutions” blog back in October of last year will remember my bitterness around owning a BlackBerry whilst the entire nation around me was stroking their iPhones. Well in the last twelve months I finally managed to come up with a cunning way of acquiring an iPhone. My plan was simple, build an iPhone application for my company’s Business Transaction Management solution and then kindly request an iPhone from my company to perform user acceptance testing on. This plan sounds all very simple but there is a catch, I would have to write the PRD for this iPhone application along with finding a developer to help me build it (my developer days faded back in 2005). Bearing in mind I’ve never used iOS or stroked an iPhone I set out to do some market research to help me define a set of requirements and screen designs.
So where did you think I looked first? www.formula1.com . Yes, I’m mental and obsessed with cars but believe it or not this turned out to be the best bit of research I’ve done. Three hours after visiting the Formula1 website and downloading their application from the AppStore I had the iBTM PRD nailed with use cases, requirements and screen designs. The thing that struck me the most with the F1 app was how easy and simple it was to find the information I was looking for. In a stroke and two clicks I could go from a race to a session to live timing on track, the information was presented so clearly even a goldfish could keep up with what was happening in the race. So my initial thoughts for iBTM were “wouldn’t it be cool to go from an Application to a Business Transaction to its Tiers in two clicks”. In the same way Formula1 delivers timing of drivers lap times and sectors I could do the same with Applications, Transactions and Tier timing along with their SLA status. A user could view a list of their applications, spot an SLA breach, click on an application and view its business transactions, check which business transaction was breaching and click again to view the Tier latency/SLA management to see what was causing those breaches. I could also allow a user to start from an alert so they could go Alert > Application > Transaction > Tiers and understand what caused the alert in seconds. Here is my screen PRD mock-ups for the App:

So how does it work? Simply put, we built the app using the iPhone SDK (thanks to our superstar developer Mark Berner!), then we built a web services API for our BTM management servers (we allow federation) that allows iBTM to communicate so it can query information from OpTier BTM. Connectivity wise iPhone’s now come with comprehensive VPN capabilities that allow iPhones to connect to corporate networks either through 3G or WiFi. We’ve been testing connectivity and response times from all over the world and iBTM is super fast no matter where your accessing it from (it actually doesn’t retrieve that much data). With the recent hype around iPads life got sweeter as iBTM runs just fine with the standard x2 zoom you get for native iPhone applications. Here is a photo of an iPad working with iBTM connecting to one of our test BTM management servers:

iBTM works on the iPad and iPhone

Feedback from analysts, customers and prospects has been very encouraging. We’ve seen several executives get really hyped over a simple application that provides them with powerful visibility and intelligence into their business transactions, infrastructure and application performance. In two clicks an Executive or Application Owner can determine business impact and isolate which part of IT is causing SLA breaches all from the comfort of their iPhone or iPad. We’re already working on v2 of iBTM so stay tuned! Watch my youtube overview of iBTM:

You can download OpTier iBTM from the Apple AppStore.

October 28, 2010 at 5:44 pm OpTier Leave a comment