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.

As a vendor of BTM solutions, we know what our costs are, so that part of the equation is fairly simple to figure out.  Trying to put a dollar amount on the value of BTM is where things get trickier.

The common way of quantifying the value is breaking it down into value points that derive from the different ways customers use BTM.  For example, practically every user who deployed a BTM solution in Production has been using it, among other things, to prevent application outages.  If we can determine the monetary cost of an outage – and we can – and if we can show that BTM has reduced outages by a certain percentage (or eliminated them entirely), we will be able to calculate how much money was saved by deploying BTM for outage avoidance.

And outage avoidance is just one of the many use-case scenarios for BTM.  Virtually everyone who implemented BTM has also discovered how useful it can be for problem isolation and resolution.  Just like with outages, it is possible to measure or estimate the cost of the problem determination and resolution cycle.  If it can then be demonstrated that the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) for performance issues dropped by 70% since a BTM solution was implemented, we can add this windfall as another component in the total value of BTM.

We can come up with more use-case scenarios for BTM and estimate how much money was saved in each one of them.  BTM can cut costs by improving processes such as application optimization, QA testing, SLA management, capacity planning, activity-based costing, application consolidation, and more.  Each one of these cost savings can contribute nicely to the bottom line value of BTM in an organization, but does this total really represent the value of BTM for the organization?

I hereby propose that it does not.

If we examine all the different scenarios in which BTM is used, we can see one common element and that is that BTM provides a new level of visibility that did not exist beforehand.  BTM allows IT to see things that they could not see before.

Consider this analogy: Nine year-old Jack is a vision-impaired kid who, for the first time in his life, gets a pair of glasses that allows him to see clearly.  How much are the glasses worth to him?  We could point out that with his new glasses on, Jack successfully avoided an incoming car as he was crossing the street and saved himself from being badly injured or worse.  Also, Jack now spends only 30 minutes a day doing homework whereas before it used to take him well over two hours.  Furthermore, Jack’s family can finally move out of their expensive house, which has special amenities for the vision impaired, and into a regular house.  This will cut down their rent by almost 20%.

Each one of these observations can be translated into a dollar amount, but is this getting us any closer to determining the true value of glasses for nine year-old Jack?  What about the fact that for the first time, Jack can see what his parents and sister look like?  His amazement when he found out that his cat actually has one blue eye and one green eye?  His pride at finally being able to read books and watch TV just like the other kids?  Isn’t Jack getting far more value out of these simple discoveries and accomplishments than from having to spend less time doing homework?

BTM is a game-changing technology. Being able to see transactions clearly enables IT to stop “flying blind” and start making informed decisions that take service management to the next level.  Just like Jack with his new glasses, once IT starts using BTM regularly, they can no longer manage without it even for one day.  What, then, is the real value of BTM for an organization?  The question will remain open for now, but I can tell you that much – it goes far, far beyond just being able to avoid outages and fix problems faster.

When people in IT learn about Business Transaction Management for the first time, their reaction is often a similar mix of awe and disbelief.  They are awed, because gaining true visibility into the behavior and flow of all business transactions has been an industry holy grail for quite some time now, and they also express disbelief, well, for the exact same reason.  How is it possible to auto-discover and track all business transactions, when transactions are not tangible, manageable configuration elements like servers and routers?  At best, such technology might work in a simple, straightforward environment, but our IT environment is huge, complex, distributed, heterogeneous… can this BTM work for us?

Like other emerging technologies, BTM is climbing up a maturity curve.  From just being able to show round-trip response times and infer some latency breakdown of network versus data center time, superior BTM solutions are now capable of tracking transactions deep into the data center, providing rich, granular topology views that cross hundreds of web, application, authentication, messaging, and database servers.  The ability to show simple request-response sequences has expanded to cover complex, asynchronous flows using pub/sub and “send and forget” messaging protocols.  In addition to showing all transactions, some BTM solutions will now auto-discover and show entire business processes, aggregating many discrete transactions into a “short list” of real business flows.  The ability to measure service quality is also maturing from application and server uptime SLAs (remember five nines?) to transaction-specific response time SLAs and Apdex ratings that represent end-user satisfaction in real-time.

Despite being one of the privileged few who witnessed BTM grow from a mere idea into a full-blown enterprise solution, I still find myself sometimes awed by this technology.  It is, after all, an ambitious attempt to visualize complex, abstract business ideas, and manage them like any other assets of the organization.  How is it possible?  Does it really work?  As my friend and colleague Andy previously noted, the “aha moment” for BTM typically doesn’t arrive until after the customer has already seen it live in their own environment.  And that’s when the fun begins.