Business Transaction Management Blog

Saddle-up, Las Vegas!

By Linh C. Ho
Follow on Twitter: linh_ho_nyc

Another year ending with the Annual Gartner Data Center show in Las Vegas! This show has grown quite a bit since I first attended almost a decade ago. I believe over 2500 attendees this year roamed around the Caesars Palace with name badges hanging on the belly—some camouflaged with the fans of the National Finals Rodeo.

This year, the hot topic was not only cloud computing but seems there were a lot of discussions around DevOps and analytics. Other topics of interest included Application Performance Monitoring (APM), End-user Experience (EUE), Business Transaction Management (BTM), Big Data and many more around IT operations.

Take a gander (something like that) at the few bits and bites I picked up, particularly found the polling questions interesting to share.

Poll: what is the biggest reason ITOps group isn’t doing more innovation?

• 41% too busy with day to day operations
• 27% politics
• 11% cultural
• 9% feel they are very innovative
• 7% not a priority
• None or others

Not surprising. When IT is too busy with day to day operations like keeping the lights on, and expensive resources are stuck on a conference bridge figuring who is accountable to fix the problem; of course there is no time and resources put into innovation. Only when IT is proactive and preventive to issues that innovation has a spot on the agenda. Though, 9% feel very innovative (innuh-vaaa-div as rodeos would say) :-)  – I’d be interested in hearing from this 9% to understand what they are working on! Innovation clearly brings new ideas that drive change and create value that can only enable better business outcomes. If you’ve had a positive change in business outcome due to innovation; please do share!

Poll: what is your top priority for availability and performance tool investment for the coming budget year?

• 26% APM
• 21% ECA
• 14% SLA
• 7% Virtualization
• 7% Server Monitoring
• 5% Network Monitoring
• 2% BSM
• 2% Cloud

Indeed APM is hot again, though this is referring to ‘new APM’ which is above and beyond the traditional deep-dive tools. One of the analyst cautioned about using last millennium’s tools to solve today’s problems! Deep-dive is only a slice of five dimensions of APM according to Gartner. Gartner did publish a 2011 APM Magic Quadrant which seven vendors were positioned in the leader’s quadrant (and meeting all five dimensions): OpTier, CA, Compuware, HP, IBM, Opnet and Quest. If you’re in the 26%, here’s a complimentary copy of the APM report.

APM inquiries according to the analysts seem to have increased by over 50% compared to last year. Within APM, end-user experience and business transaction profiling are touted the two hottest topics.

Event Correlation Analysis (ECA) is second to APM, beyond ECA but somewhat related, we see customers looking to apply analytics for both IT and business operations. Approaches such as multi-dimensional OLAP (online analytical processing), CEP (complex event processing) and log analysis are commonly seen. Log parsing and analysis comes up for those looking to parse log files to assist with trouble-shooting primarily. Bringing intelligence through the likes of CEP helps IT elevate its awareness of business impact, prioritization and prevent abnormal behaviors in both IT and business operations. Multi-dimensional OLAP helps bring different perspectives easily and quickly for problem isolation, impact assessment, resolution, optimization and more. For example one can view service levels by business transactions, by users, by applications or flip it around to get resource consumption by applications, users, and transactions—think of a rubik’s cube for IT management.

These all borrow business intelligence concepts for the world of IT management – which is not a bad thing when the ultimate goal is aligning IT and the business.

I am surprised to see only 2% cloud for the next coming year, perhaps the audience weren’t sure what Gartner meant by ‘cloud’ as it could be different extremes of initiatives. Or simply, the audience still isn’t quite ready. Lastly, I can’t say I am surprised to see 2% BSM (Business Service Management); this term has been nebulous for quite some time and since the last pure-play BSM vendor was picked up by Novell — we’re not hearing much from that corner.

DevOps surfaced quite a bit, here’s a couple of interesting polls.

Poll: Is your organization leveraging DevOps?

• 62% have not heard of DevOps before
• 11% aware of DevOps but not planning to use it
• 9% experimenting – not in production
• 8% using for both critical and non-critical apps
• 7% considering using DevOps in next 12-14 months
• 3% using it for non critical apps

This was a surprise – 62% have not heard of DevOps? To defend it, bridging the gap between dev and ops; we’re just not there yet. The reality is more “OpsDev” – how to help IT operation guys bring factual data to the Dev guys to fix issues that are causing pain in production. IT operation needs to be proactive at crossing over that wall. This can only improve productivity, communication and eliminate the traditional siloed approach. There is still some work to do here to break the great wall.

Poll: what process is most in need of being addressed via Devops?

• 36% Release management
• 35% Change management
• 12% performance management
• 12% capacity management
• Others

Not shocking. Change and release management are key processes to address via DevOps – how often do changes cause performance problems? Do you understand the change impact on your end-user experience, critical business transactions, application performance? Effective change and release processes can only be achieved with solid collaboration between dev and ops to minimize application rollbacks, improve quality releases and reduce risks of impacting performance.

Finally, kudos to the Gartner analysts for the informative sessions, one-on-ones, dinners and drinks – they’ve gone the extra mile for attendees and vendors! Usually Gartner will have a write up on the Data Center poll results the following spring; buckle up! it will be interesting to see what they make out of all this!

Until then, have a safe and happy holiday season!

December 20, 2011 at 6:35 pm Leave a comment

APM hits Times Square

By Linh C. Ho

Follow on Twitter: linh_ho_nyc

OpTier’s marketing team spent a morning with our cameraman outside the office asking passersby in Times Square what they think Application Performance Management (APM) means, what they do when they experience a poorly performing application/website, why they think there is such problems, — let me just say that for a fun video, we quickly realized that today’s end-users are savvier than we think!

We interviewed about 40 people on the street and gathered some interesting statistics around end-user experience, application performance and business transactions.

Check out the two street interviews!

What is Application Performance Management? (duration 1:50) >>

Poor application performance from your end-users perspective (duration 4min)>>

Linh

September 20, 2011 at 3:49 pm Leave a comment

Intelligence and Agility for the Complex World of Retail

By Linh C. Ho

Retailers are quickly realizing the value of adopting technologies that provide insight and analysis of their customers’ behaviour and experience. The most recent example, smartphone applications which allow major retailers to track and offer promotions to shoppers as they walk from outside the store, to counters, to cash registers and even inside the dressing room. Every move gives the retailer more information and insight. 

While there’s no ignoring the value of a technology that provides a new generation of intelligence and agility, the 100’s or even 1000’s of transactions taking place with a customer’s every move can strain a retailers IT infrastructure and impact transaction response times and ultimately the business bottom line. According to a leading analyst firm, a key growth area for 2011 is retailers looking to upgrade e-commerce platforms, multichannel infrastructures and application strategies so they can deliver a seamless cross-channel shopping experience across touch points. In order for these applications, transactions (and mobile applications) to run smoothly and ensure the legitimacy of each and every transaction, retailers need to consider a new generation of technology.

Enterprise systems monitoring solutions have done a great job providing key metrics related to the individual silo, for example server CPU, memory or network bandwidth and uptime. However, these monitoring tools often fail to detect application problems felt by the user community and IT continues to rely on the end-users to call the helpdesk for problem notification. Moreover, these silo monitoring solutions do not provide the business context and intelligence that IT needs to run like a strategic business unit. As the business demands become more sophisticated, so should the requirements for IT management technologies. The reality is IT infrastructures are part of the retail DNA!

The latest trends have been to adopt a combination of Complex Event Processing (CEP), Business Transaction Management (BTM) and End-User Experience Monitoring (EUEM).  Take CEP for example, the goal of CEP is to provide situational knowledge and awareness to help the users to accurately sense and respond to business needs. CEP does this by correlating and processing the complex events (IT or business events) to help a business understand any business operational abnormality. For example, CEP can monitor and determine when the stock levels for the book “The King’s Speech” are within 10 percent of the minimum stock level given the last 10 hours of buying behaviour and send an event to begin the re-stocking process to the distribution center.

CEP alone isn’t enough for IT management. Combining CEP with the rise of BTM and EUEM, which captures transactions executed by end-users across an organization, has allowed more companies to gain real-time quantifiable business impact that IT needs. For example: how many transactions and which channels have been impacted, what is the total revenue loss, which regional customers are impacted, where is the bottleneck in the business process, was there a security breach by a user?

BTM with a CEP engine brings together events impacting business transactions, processes, activities and customer experience. This sophisticated combination is an ideal technology for retail organizations that want intelligent and agile ways to sell products and services to customers—plus provides IT with a reliable infrastructure to back it up. BTM provides the end-to-end transactions flow perspective, so it ensures that when any problems are detected, the right IT staff can fix the problem immediately without losing sight of any transaction.

The EUEM on the other hand, known for detecting application performance problems, provides the customer experience perspective. EUEM provides an understanding of the impact on the end-users experience no matter what location they may be. 

A powerful combination of BTM, EUEM and CEP would give critical perspectives to IT management:

• A real-time transaction-centric service model to show all transaction relationships with their supporting IT infrastructure components
• Visibility of all business transactions and transaction flows
• Transaction and application diagnostics for quick root cause of problems
• End-user experience and behaviour perspective
• Business operations and processes perspective with intelligent analytics

 These perspectives give retailers a better understanding of events as they happen, enabling them to be more clever and focused in how they engage with customers.

The faster a retailer can respond to shopping pattern changes and customers’ behavior, the more competitive it is and thus the more money it makes. Retail is an industry area in which these critical perspectives can be particularly effective for the IT organization and even the line of business managers. Information about promotions such as daily-deals like Groupons and Living Social, prices, competition, stock availability, and locations only give customers greater control of the shopping process. Retailers continue to face the competitive pressure and need to be ahead of their game.

Retailers that harness new generation technology that provides critical business-centric perspectives are able to gain real-time insight, not only into their business transactions and end-users experience, but also into the complex patterns within their IT infrastructure. Moreover, such solutions typically give retailers an easy way to understand any change impact on the users, the business and the IT infrastructure. For example, retailers can compare between two time periods for a before and after effect of any given promotion or campaign.

This allows retail organizations to be more responsive to the market, make better informed decisions and ultimately are more successful.

March 17, 2011 at 4:00 pm Leave a comment

Basel III – The compliance conundrum

By Linh C. Ho

This week I spent a morning at the NYSE with a number of investment bankers. When talking to banking technologists, some of the top priorities are customer experience, global platform, innovation and regulations/compliance. In this blog, I want to focus in on compliance specifically the new Basel III.

Critics have not been kind to Basel III. While few will argue that championing greater visibility and tighter regulation of liquidity controls is a bad thing.  It’s widely believed that the legislation lacks teeth and is, in truth, a fairly weak ‘knee jerk’ reaction to the economic crisis. Regardless of sideline criticism, implementation of the legislation in some form will be vital to the future of the banking system. In practice, it is potential confusion around the cross over between Basel II and III that will be the real sticking point.

The fact is, even if analysts and banks do come around to the new legislation ideals, they are likely to have trouble implementing the processes effectively within their current IT environment. As Alison Ebbage noted in her recent article for FST, one of the key challenges that banks face in their drive towards Basel III, is fragmented and siloed IT infrastructures. The article noted that this can make things cloudy in terms of generating a holistic view of events happening across trading platforms. This poses a significant operational risk to banks.

In terms of mitigating unforeseen risks, the onus is still very much with the banks to ensure that their internal processes and failures don’t let them down. In particular, The Accord specifically cites business disruption, data loss and security breaches arising from system failure as events that banks need to protect themselves against. As these processes are very much enabled by technology, IT needs to ensure its got its own back.

If banks are to enforce the latest legislation, simplifying these complicated IT landscapes will be the key to success, but it’s certainly a tricky business. For years banks have invested in sprawling systems, adding more and more layers as they were needed. In this situation, identifying how, why and where an IT problem has occurred is arduous, time consuming and expensive. With a complicated mismatch of systems and pressure to implement new regulations, I’d bet my bottom dollar that most IT managers wish they could clear out their IT cupboard and start again.  So, with operational risk a much overlooked – yet pivotal – part of Basel III, what’s a bank to do?

Flipping IT management on its head is a good starting point. Rather than thinking about individual application systems and how they’re performing, banks need to generate an end-to-end view of all business transactions in real-time. Transactions touch multiple applications, IT services, business services and possibly run in and out of the cloud. Banks need a way to tag and track the transaction flow to ensure there is absolutely no blindspots. Moreover, when regulators and auditors require historical reports on systems performance and reasons for losing sight of transactions–it is IT that will have to generate them.  Traditionally this hasn’t been possible because IT management has been just as siloed as the systems it monitors. Because of these siloes, blindspots have been created for IT, making it harder for IT to quickly find and fix problems. This situation has made it very difficult to avoid downtime or application slowdown. Steering clear of these potential threats is crucial in order to reduce risk, which in turn makes it easier to monitor compliance processes. If comprehensive records of IT performance are the norm, potential areas of risk can be readily identified and acted upon. By ensuring these records are in place and are constantly updated, the humble IT department will become recognised as a vital, reliable and valuable business unit.

March 10, 2011 at 9:59 pm 1 comment

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas and this blog

By Linh C. Ho

Last week I put on my blue suede shoes and spent the week in viva Las Vegas! I was attending Gartner’s 29^th annual data center and IT operations conference—of course. To no one’s surprise, the main theme of the conference was around cloud computing and virtualization. Over 2000 IT professionals marched up and down the Caesars Palace between sessions, analyst one-on-ones, and perhaps a round of black jack by the dancing dolls

Without a doubt, trends to watch were on the horizon – some of the top trends I picked up from one of the keynotes are:

• Virtualization is just starting: it is not a one-time project, it’s a process! the number of virtualized PCs will grow from less than 5 million in 2007 to 660 million by 2011.
• Big data – big elephant or was it gorilla in the room? Storage continues to grow at an average of 50% to 60% CAGR in most enterprises.
• Energy efficiency and monitoring: data centers can consume 40 to 100 times more energy than offices they support! Big need to measure and report on consumption!
• Unified communication and collaboration: incorporate mobile devices into the enterprise!
• Staff retention and retraining: how do you keep staff from leaving? The US department of labor estimates that today’s labor force will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38!
• Social networks: don’t band Facebook, Youtube or Twitter from your staff! Did you know more video was uploaded to youtube in the last 2 months than ABC, CBS, NBC had been airing new content since 1948?? (OpTier uploaded 4 in the last month!) check em’ out!
• Cloud computing: it reduces operating expenses, improves agility –yes great hype but focus on results!

While the name of the game was to count how many times the word ‘cloud’ gets mentioned in a session, I was keeping an ear out for ‘OpTier’.  The topics of interest were application performance management, end-user experience, ITILv3, CMDB/CMS, business service management, virtualization and (drum roll) cloud.

Few additional things I’ve picked up from the sessions:

• User defined transaction flow or Business Transaction Management (BTM) is the most popular inquiry in application management area in 2010. (DING! For OpTier!)
• Warning of small niche deep-dive vendors in Java/.NET claiming to do BTM! –they don’t!
• Application Performance Management (APM) continues to be a hot area:
• 2009 APM inquiries: 650
• 2010 APM inquiries to date: 700+
• 2009 APM market size: $1.5B
• 2010 APM market size ~$2B (with 10% annual growth going forward – only virtualization management is growing faster)
• End-user Experience management continues to be a hot priority (DING! For OpTier!)
• A lot more emphasis on ITIL and process improvement from Gartner this year. I believe they even hired a new analyst to cover ITIL. This must be a reflection of the US adoption. While Gartner shows that over 30% are 3-5 years into ITIL, the majority of the audience is at maturity level 2 or 3. This means that enterprises are becoming more process-centric and proactive rather than reactive.
• Investment in managing cloud is mostly in private cloud only, very little <5% investment in managing public cloud.

All and all, I have found the conference very informative and worthwhile! I have been going to this conference for many years, this was by far the biggest datacenter show I’ve seen. Viva Las Vegas!

December 15, 2010 at 6:43 pm Leave a comment

OpTier, the Company that Defined BTM — Forrester

By Linh C. Ho

Forrester recognizes OpTier as the company that defined BTM and already delivers capabilities that meet new market shift

Forrester today broadcasted the results of their Application Performance Management (APM) and Business Transaction Management (BTM) analysis. In this webcast that supplemented their recent research paper called: Competitive Analysis: APM and BTM – Forrester brings some clarity on the different technologies and approaches on the market, even though most share similar goal of helping IT manage the complexity of business services. Forrester analyzes 25 vendors and provides some guidance in product selection with a SWOT analysis (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) for all these vendors. In this report, Forrester recognizes OpTier for being:

• The pioneer and the company that defined BTM
• Already on the future path of APM-BTM-and Complex Events Processing or CEP convergence as OpTier advances its technology to be closer to the business
• The established reference for BTM.

OpTier BTM  is the market leading solution for enterprise clients looking for immediate value for multiple stakeholders: business line managers, process owners, IT operations, application owners and support, QA and development. In a single solution, OpTier BTM:

• provides the most dimensions/views to help IT or the business understand impact and quickly isolate problem areas
• automatically discovers and dynamically maps transaction/application dependencies (great of CMDB projects!) via its real-time living topology
• manages application performance and business transactions in real-time, 24/7
• helps analyze change-impact for any new initiatives such as virtualization and cloud
• is flexible to tailor rich data sets for strategic corporate or executive dashboards with business KPIs
• provides resource utilization and cost metrics for capacity planners (with business transaction and application context) – great for provisioning and planning around cloud/virtualization

Forrester positioned OpTier in the true Business Transaction Management category and in the APM-BTM-CEP convergence as the market shifts! This is why leading corporations such as Deutsche Bank, Wachovia, Avery Dennison, Blue Cross Blue Shields and many more bank on OpTier as the trusted advisor to partner with and evolve with as business needs change.

September 29, 2010 at 10:45 pm Leave a comment

Moving Transactions to the Cloud?

By Linh C. Ho

Recently, I was interviewed by Joe McKendrick of Insurance Networking News. Joe wanted to know our thoughts on the challenges when it comes to business transactions and the cloud,  and how can enterprises mitigate risks of impacting their business. It also became apparent that conservative industries such as insurance (at least more conservative than their peers in banking or others), will be late adopters of the cloud. In the article we discuss how claims, medicare, actuarial and any critical service that is either revenue-generating or client-impacting will just have to wait unless insurers have the ability to ensure minimal to no disruption to the business and their end-users’ experience.

Full article by Joe McKendrick can be found here.

September 13, 2010 at 1:56 pm Leave a comment

Webinar sur demande

Par Linh C. Ho

Webinar sur demande:
Combler les lacunes de la gestion de la performance applicative

Amener de la valeur commerciale à l’IT est plus facile à dire qu’a faire. De nombreuses entreprises ont la plupart ou tous les outils de monitoring qui promettaient une approche basée sur la gestion de la performance applicative de bout-en-bout. Toutefois, la plupart n’ont pas tenu leurs promesses.

Mon webinar sur demande avec Jean Pierre Garbani analyste du cabinet Forrester donnera un aperçu de :
• Quelle est la différence entre APM, BSM, BTM ?
• Qu’est ce que vous apportent les outils de monitoring d’aujourd’hui ?
• Qu’est ce que les outils de gestion de la performance applicative ne vous apportent pas ?
• Comment créer de la valeur commerciale pour l’IT et qui soit significative pour le Business ?
• L’importance d’apporter l’impact business en temps réel à l’IT

Pour vous enregister: http://bit.ly/dpFbkV

July 26, 2010 at 9:18 pm Leave a comment