Posts filed under ‘Uncategorized’
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.
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
On-demand webcast: What you see is NOT what you get!
By Linh C. Ho
This week, I gave a joint webcast with industry analyst from TRAC research, Bojan Simic. The topic is about poor end-user experience and how green lights in IT does not mean happy customer experience!
Most businesses rely on traditional application performance tools to ensure applications are performing as expected. While nearly everyone has experienced poor online performance, most never mention it, choosing to abandon the transaction instead. This lack of visibility can cost companies millions in lost revenue and productivity.
In this webinar, Bojan Simic of Trac Research and yours truly (me) explore the business impact of poor customer experience, then offer solutions to bridge the gap in application performance management (APM), including new trends in end user monitoring.
We also took some live poll questions on the value IT organizations see in investing in end-user experience solution and what approaches is the audience taking to measure application performance.
For the archived webinar, please register at: http://bit.ly/cYgOam
4 in 5 Americans would pick up the phone if they ran into difficulties online w/insurance companies
During the ACORD Loma Insurance Systems Forum last month, we heard a lot of talk about customer efficiency and improving customer experience. Today, we announced the results of a survey conducted for OpTier by Ipsos Public Affairs that also points to the need for insurers to provide a better online experience for customers.
Some of the most interesting results of the survey include:
- Four out of five Americans (83 percent) are likely to resolve any issues they experience in purchasing or processing a claim online by reaching for the phone.
- Young people aged 18-34 are 10 percentage points more likely than older consumers to have already purchased or plan to purchase or research health insurance online (25 percent vs. 15 percent, respectively).
We all know that online customers looking to resolve claims and other issues via phone are an expensive proposition for insurance companies. BTM is one way for insurance companies to be sure online operations are keeping pace with customer needs. Solutions such as OpTier BTM help to alert staff to problems in real time so issues such as slow response times are resolved before they impact customer service.
You can find the full results of our survey on the Ipsos website at http://www.ipsos-na.com/news-polls/pressrelease.aspx?id=4797.
In addition, to learn more about how BTM can help insurance companies to improve customer service, listen to our recent webcast with Forrester’s Ellen Carney where we discuss how to manage dynamic IT change in a complex insurance environment.
What Application Monitoring Tools Aren’t Telling You
By Linh C. Ho
With many traditional monitoring and management tool solutions on the market today, IT professionals are left holding the bag on how to piece together the solutions to deliver the data they need. And now new technologies are changing the way you manage IT and what you should expect from IT management solutions. See what you’re missing today and how things like shared services, cloud and business-oriented IT management are impacting traditional thinking.
In this session we will explore:
- What existing monitoring tools tell you today
- What they don’t tell you
- What’s the difference between BSM, BTM & APM
- How to add business value to your existing IT management investments
- How to gain real-time business impact intelligence for IT
To register: http://bit.ly/b15SnI
When: Thursday, June 10 2010 – 9am ET / 2pm BST
Acord LOMA Insurance Systems Forum
By Linh C. Ho
This week, I’ve attended the Acord LOMA Insurance Systems Forum in Las Vegas — other than sharing drinks and discussions with a Forrester analyst and journalists at the Mandalay Bay; I wanted to share the common themes from the show in my latest iBlog: iBlog_ Accord Loma Show
iBlog: Wall Street Gone Wild..Taking Investors for a Ride
By Linh C. Ho
Yesterday’s stock turbulence was one of the largest point drop ever, trigged by a typo from a single trader. That one error led to an automated trading frenzy and triggered a rapid selloff that left SEC, NYSE and Nasdaq officials with no choice but to cancel some afternoon trades. This computerized selloff is yet another reminder that organizations typically do not have full visibility into business transactions.
Even though the computer systems performed adequately – if these trading platforms were monitored with Business Transaction Management (BTM) technology, this rapid automated selloff could have been mitigated. Yesterday’s event highlights the need for visibility into real business transactions in real-time. This level of transaction monitoring can immediately detect any abnormal trade activity, and quickly alert staff.
This iBlog provides insight into how BTM can help mitigate such risk, also we share the broader financial challenges gathered from speaking with industry analysts, financial experts and customers. Challenges impacting IT management include:
- Regulations
- Process efficiency/Business Process Reengineering/Outsourcing
- Quality improvement
- Mergers and acquisitions
OpTier Chalk Talks
By Linh C. Ho
Check out OpTier’s latest chalk talks on the value of end-user experience management, and the new starter edition offer (limited time only!) of real-user monitoring and business transaction management. The OpTier chalk talks feature product manager Marie-Pierre Belanger and yours truly — moi. Don’t forget the outtakes! :-)
Pages or people? OpTier has redefined end-user experience monitoring.
By Russell Rothstein
April 28, 2010
End-User Experience Monitoring. Real User Montoring. The key words here are Experience and Real. When you are choosing a solution for monitoring the experience of your customers, partners and employees, it’s critical to keep their perspective in mind.
What’s important to your users – pages or transactions? When you are banking online, and it’s taking a long time to view that suspicious-looking check that you supposedly wrote last week, do you care about the rest of the page? The page probably includes more information about your account activity and enables you to conduct additional transactions like transferring funds and tracking automatic payments. But you may not even know what page you are on. Your only concern is the business transaction that you are currently trying to complete – viewing your cancelled check.
Yet most end-user experience monitors track pages or page objects. Pages are significant to application developers, but they are rarely meaningful to users or the business. Of course we need to track information about pages in order to isolate and resolve problems. But in order to understand the user experience, and to triangulate that with SLAs and business priorities, you need to monitor and measure the performance of business transactions.
Part of the problem with monitoring pages lies in the definition of a page. Technically speaking, a page is a URI, a Unique Resource Identifier. But what the user views as a page may actually be a container displaying a number of URIs. When we are monitoring pages, it’s important to be able to track and analyze the page as a transaction – the way the user experiences it – as well as in its component parts. Given all of this complexity, it’s also important to be able to identify, classify and group the page components automatically, while leveraging as much meaningful information as possible. Otherwise, you are going to spend a lot of time manually “recreating” the application your users experience from an assortment of objects and content items with unrecognizable names.
According to one industry analyst, “One of the key goals in deploying end-user monitoring solutions is to move from an IT-centric view to actually realizing how IT is contributing to business goals. The value of end-user experience information significantly increases if organizations have capabilities for translating application performance metrics into business metrics such as lost revenue opportunities, conversions, the value of transactions failed, application utilization, disruptions of business processes, etc.” By using a Business Transaction Management (BTM) approach to End-User Experience Monitoring, you can evaluate your users “real experience” and measure its impact on your business.
Building a next generation BTM UI
by Anonymous, 20th April 2010.
It’s the day after we put the finishing touches to a brand new BTM UI and I feel like I’ve gone 12 rounds with Mike Tyson. It’s true what they say though, No Pain No Gain. I’ve been on the ropes, been knocked down several times but like Elton John says “I’m still standing”. A new baby is born and its certainly not an ugly one. I am expecting a few tears though when our field organization and customers gets their hands on it and start to shake it for the first time.
To be precise or wily it’s taken 18 months, 125 pages, 50+ detailed designs, 65 flights (most to Tel Aviv), 50+ customer meetings/webex’s, thousands of emails, hundreds of arguments, thousands of beers (5 beers per argument) and a good few hundred bugs. All for the sake of Business Transaction Management. Has it been worth it? Absolutely.
About 18 months ago OpTier made a decision to build a next generation BTM user interface. It was becoming increasingly clear from customers and prospects that the value of BTM touched many stakeholders in the business and IT. Our previous GUI was more focused towards the technical audience being application support teams and application developers. When you track all transactions across all tiers all of the time and provide response time, SLA and resource consumption metrics by Application, Transaction, User, Location and Tiers you end up collecting a lot of valuable information. The problem is how do you show all this information to the right user in the right context? What is relevant for an application owner isn’t always relevant for an application support team or a capacity planner. Showing a technical view to a business stakeholder is like an English person receiving an Hebrew menu in an Israeli restaurant (not good when you’re hungry). Therefore one of the first decisions we made was to make our BTM GUI role based so we could support a variety of users and use cases. Simply put, a user logs in and is presented with a series of “activities” relevant to their role. Each activity (e.g. problem isolation) has a series of tailored views which allows the user to perform that activity using information which is only relevant to that user. For example, a business user is typically interested in business transaction volume, activity and SLA compliance – they don’t really care about CPU usage, tier chattiness or how many I/O operations happen when a business transaction is executed.
The second key decision we made was to make the GUI extensible from both an architecture and user perspective. It’s obviously good to provide out of the box roles, activities and views for our customers. However, the needs of every customer and user is different no matter how hard you try to support every use case. Therefore users can simply create their own roles, activities and views to make BTM information more relevant to them incorporating their own context, terminology and processes. With 13 dimensions (application, transaction, users, locations, tiers, …), 100+ available metrics, 3 working modes, 10 different visualizations (table, charts, clouds, GoogleMaps, …) and a slick graphic design built on top of Flex technology the possibilities to our users are now endless. In the current beta release we support 10 BTM activities with over 75 different BTM views, if users want something different they can go right ahead and create whatever activity and view they wish. Over the next 18 months we’ll be adding more dimensions, metrics and visualization that will help customers truly manage IT from a business perspective, the future is bright.
The last key decision was to outsource the whole usability and graphic design aspects of our GUI. OpTier specializes in tracking transactions across tiers, it does not specialize in designing user interfaces. BTM is our business, usability is someone else’s business (Puzzlehead in this case). I can tell you right now though usability is a political hot potato. Get 2 people in the same room and you’ll get two different opinions on what is intuitive, get 25 people in the room and you’ll get 25 different opinions. You’d be surprised how many times I heard the words “When I used to develop GUI we did it like this…”. As Einstein once said “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. When you work with a usability company you’re implicitly trusting them to do the right thing based on your inputs and feedback. Unless your open minded with usability experts you’ll always look to the past instead of looking into the future. What was relevant 10 years ago in GUI might not be relevant in 2010. GUI from my perspective is more art than science, it has to capture the imagination and invite the user to play. Larry Ellison once said “When you innovate you’ve got to be prepared for people to tell you you’re crazy.”
Like anything which is brand new though, we’ll have our issues. I’m not naïve enough to think that our new GUI will be perfect from day one, it’s a significant improvement and departure from our existing GUI. We’ll be able to show more value than we could have possibly imagined 18 months ago with our previous GUI. Our users can access BTM value in a single click depending on what they are trying to accomplish. You want to see your application CPU consumption over time? Click on this view. You want to understand the business impact of the release you’ve just released to production? Click on this view. You want to see the individual transactions user X executed? Click on this view.
I see this GUI as the start of something new and exciting rather than the end of just another GUI project. GUI’s should evolve and provide users with something fresh, unique and exciting. Innovation isn’t about standing back and admiring what you’ve delivered in the past, it’s about constantly listening to what your customers want and coming up with killer ideas so you can deliver that competitive edge to your business and your customers business.
OpTier
Assaf Amit
Andy Wetzel
Russell Rothstein
Motti Tal
Linh C. Ho
Diego Lomanto
iddoav
