And while OpTier won’t be releasing a 3-D feature film any time soon, we do believe a multi-dimensional approach is critical to that new genre of enterprise IT service management – managing private clouds. Private clouds are becoming more pervasive – according to Gartner, by 2012 enterprises will spend more than half of their cloud dollars on private cloud services because of improvements in cost and management efficiency.

OpTier BTM provides performance management, resource management, and cost-based accounting for private clouds

OpTier takes a multi-dimensional approach to the cloud. In order to provide true end-to-end service management in the cloud, you need to include visibility into both virtual and physical metrics. Only with a business transactional-based approach do you have 3-D visibility to cover the three key dimensions of transactions that flow through the cloud:

• Time per transaction (i.e. cloud performance management)
• Resource utilization per transaction (i.e. cloud capacity management)
• Cost per transaction (i.e. chargeback and activity-based costing for the cloud)

Frost and Sullivan found that two of the top three concerns about cloud are loss of control and availability. OpTier’s business transaction management approach to private clouds is the most efficient manner to address these concerns – enabling organizations to take control and assure 24/7 availability of services in the cloud.

So the OpTier 3-D feature film may be off in the future, but for some time already, OpTier customers have been using OpTier BTM’s 3-dimensional approach to manage services in the cloud on a daily basis. Now that’s worth an Oscar speech.

For those of you not previously familiar with flittering, it means sending a flirtatious tweet to someone that interests you in the room. And while having the option of flirting online is generally a good thing as it provides a new way for people to find their match, it presents a management challenge – keeping up with the fast pace of the tweets and achieving the visibility to link the virtual (witty tweets) with the physical (cute guy or gal – hopefully).

We find these issues remarkably similar to the management challenges companies face when deploying virtualization. While virtualization presents huge benefits in efficiency gains, it also creates three application management challenges:

• Lost Visibility: Applications become more difficult to manage because virtualization masks the underlying infrastructure layers. It becomes difficult to isolate the problematic tier when a problem occurs, or even understand that a problem is starting to occur before users are impacted. Likewise, it is difficult to determine the impact of VM changes on performance.
• Dynamic Environment: If becomes difficult to keep up with speed of changes in virtual infrastructure. As the folks at EMC call it – “VMotion Sickness”. Then when application performance begins to degrade, people tend to first blame the VM administrator, even if the problem lies elsewhere.
• Overprovisioning: Due to lack of visibility, enterprises often overprovision infrastructure in order to assure performance. Overprovisioning physical hosts (e.g. extra CPU) reduces the cost savings of virtualization.

Virtualization-aware Business Transaction Management addresses these challenges. With OpTier BTM you can regain the visibility lost from virtualization, keep up with changing VMs, and rightsize to maximize cost efficiencies.  And while that last sentence would fit into a 140-character tweet, we’re not sure it would get us any dates at the next flittering party.

Go Jamaica!

And while it took the Saints forty-three years to achieve their goals of success, back here in the IT industry it has taken about that long to achieve our version of a Super Bowl win – true business-IT alignment.

There is a lot of talk in the industry about the importance of “aligning IT to business”, “managing IT based on business priorities”, and “monitoring IT infrastructure performance from a business perspective”. The concept of aligning IT with the goals of the business is not new – we’ve been talking about it ever since the first time a computer was used for a business application (by a food manufacturer in the UK!) back in 1950.

Yet, the vendor community has not been able to enable CIOs to meet their goals of B/I alignment. A key factor is that application teams, the folks in IT that liaise with the business and are in the best position to align with their LOB counterparts, are still using infrastructure-based tools to monitor and manage their environment. However, transactions are where IT and the business meet, and only with a transaction-based management approach can IT start to manage services from the business perspective. Business transaction management enables application teams to manage their environment, for the first time, from the perspective of business transactions, rather than from infrastructure metrics. (Many of you will recognize these as the still-unrealized goals of BSM – business service management; see a recent Forrester report on how BTM delivers on the promise of BSM.)

BTM answers the following questions to support B/I alignment:

• Resources: How will moving to the cloud help reduce customer churn or improve employee productivity? What is the business impact of a consolidation project? How will adding new servers or VMs change service levels?
• Process: What is the IT cost per business transaction? Is investment in new infrastructure going towards the most business-critical services? Is business impact factored into decisions for change management and release management?
• Language: Does the LOB care about the performance of silo metrics (e.g. JVM, database) or do they care about the performance of a business transaction — for example, what is the time for a submit order transaction, how long the transaction took to verify the credit card, authorize the user, check inventory, etc., and what will the performance look like when transactions increase by 100%?

Without BTM, you lack the transaction-centric information to answer these questions and are left about as helpless as defending against a Peyton Manning pass. And while the Saints achieved success with 340-pound linemen on their side, all you need is to make the move to BTM.

The Computer History Museum in Boston recently released a vintage film from 1963 on the topic of timesharing, one of the most important developments in computing, and one which has come in and out of favor several times over the last several decades as the dichotomy between remote and centrally-managed computing resources played out. The latest incarnation for centrally-managed computing resources is none other than cloud computing.

The video is fascinating, demonstrating that while we’ve come a long way in eyewear fashion, the basic paradigms of computing have not changed much over the past 45 years. Watch the video, especially the last 3 minutes, and you’ll hear the MIT professor extol the benefits of shared infrastructure and what sounds familiar to us as elastic computing in the cloud.

And while we’ll agree that there are significant differences between mainframe-based time sharing and cloud computing, it’s key to note that in both computing paradigms, there is need to attain visibility into the performance and resource utilization of what they called “programs” in the video (note the interviewer’s final question about the elapsed time of the transaction,) and what we call business transactions today.

And if you’re interested more in the topic of achieving visibility in the cloud, register for next week’s webinar on the top five capabilities for cloud computing success with special guest Mary Johnston Turner of IDC.

As a company that is focused on assuring the performance and availability of business applications, we spend a lot of time thinking about the critical applications that drive business for our customers. So we were intrigued to read that the top business application of the decade was not SAP, not salesforce.com, and not event something bought by Oracle. The winner for business application of the decade was Microsoft Excel.  This came to us as an epiphany a few days early this year as Wailgum nailed it on the head by identifying that Excel delivers value in every nook and cranny of an organization. The ongoing success of the application is due not only to its feature set but also to its high availability and performance (as long as your PC is working fine ). As more and more applications, including business productivity applications, get served in the cloud, availability and performance become a greater IT challenge.

What’s even more significant to us is that Excel is one of the few applications that is used on a regular basis to share information (e.g. metrics, KPIs, costs) between IT and the business and enable collaboration between these two groups. Which brings us to the Top 10 list of the decade that we didn’t come across. If we had found a list of the decade’s top unfulfilled strategic IT initiatives, near the top would surely be Business/IT alignment. In fact, alignment with business goals has been at the top of the CIO’s New Year’s resolution list since well before the third millennium began.

Ever since Henderson and Venkatraman’s seminal article in the 1970’s, B/I alignment has been recognized as the holy grail in the IT management industry. We here at OpTier believe that our new decade (“the tens?”, “the teens?”, “the aughts?”) will see huge progress in this area thanks to business transaction management. OpTier pioneered BTM back in 2004 and in the past year we have seen IT managers and industry analysts acknowledge the central role that BTM plays in enabling management of services from a business perspective. At the start of this new year, we are well positioned to extend our technological and market share leadership in the BTM market, and we are committed to enable enterprises in the coming decade to fully align IT with their overall business goals.

Happy 2010!

I read a discussion last week on the internet where a person asked a simple question “How can I get an End to End latency breakdown of my business transactions”. Before I’d even had chance to comment I noticed that two software vendors had already replied with links to their website claiming that they deliver exactly what the original poster was asking for (imagine the odds of that eh? ).

End to End beyond J2EE and .NET

The problem these early discovery & mapping solutions lacked is business context. They were inherently built to track IT interactions from server to server and technology to technology. They’d scan server ports, executables and protocols to try and piece together the relationships between IT assets within a data centre. Or they’d do it by listening to the actual interactions. They’d paint pretty little diagrams like the London Tube Map and then give you all the technology, versions and patch levels these assets were running. Some solutions were priced per cpu which can be highly lucrative when vendors told customers to put an agent on every server in their data centre. Unfortunately the one thing they didn’t discover or understand was the business services that ran across these IT assets. Applications and Business Services these days don’t just relate to 4 apache web servers, 8 weblogic servers and 1 Oracle database. The pervasiveness of SOA and mashups these days means a single IT asset can serve one or more business services. Applications and IT Assets no longer have a 1 to many relationship, an application isn’t simply a collection of segmented IT assets.

I did a search on Wikipedia for CMDB and found the quote “A key success factor in implementing a CMDB is the ability to automatically discover information about the CIs (auto-discovery) and track changes as they happen.”. If a business service is a CI then that’s a pretty tough proposition to auto-discover and track change on. How do you discover business context from IT assets? For starters you can stop looking at the IT assets for answers, you’ll get your versions and patch levels of Linux but you won’t get a description of your business services that flow through them.

I’ll put my head on a lance and state that Business Transaction Management (BTM) can add significant value to any CMDB project. When you start to monitor business transactions you start to acquire lots of key intelligence on how your business runs and maps to IT. You auto-discover transaction flows and the IT assets they interact with, all in real-time. It also gets better, you can store all this data historically so that you can report and compare business services and their CI’s before and after a change. You can even visualise how the business and IT asset dependencies change over time using transaction flow/topology diagrams as key evidence. When a change occurs on an IT asset you can instantly report whether this change had a positive or negative impact on your business services or transactions by reviewing related latency and SLA. I’m not claiming BTM is the answer to all CMDB pain but it solves some of the most basic and common challenges:

1. Auto-discovers business services and their IT dependencies in real-time
2. Stores information historically so you can track, report and quantify change when it occurs

Maybe BTM is the pain relief CMDB projects need right now.

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.

Before the trip my Dad would consult maps, plan the route and stops.  The worst feature of the wagon was the frequent overheating.  A dubious trait of its operator was, planning be damned, a penchant for getting lost. The “highlight” of these trips was the often hours spent in stopped traffic due to construction or on the side of the road, radiator spewing.  I have very fond memories of these trips.

Today cars have power everything:  A/C, satellite radio, GPS, Bluetooth, DVD players and TV’s!  How different is a similar summer trip today?  Cars are much more reliable.  GPS navigation shouldn’t replace trip planning, but it certainly lessens the stress of remembering every turn (being a route “expert”) and most importantly can put you back on track quickly when a problem occurs (i.e. detour, missed turn).

So where are we now as computer users or professionals in IT?  Many of us still end up “on the side of the road with the hood up” trying to address a computer problem, transaction problem or system wide outage.  We are still at the point where we are not sure exactly what will happen when “Submit” gets hit.

But just like automotive technology, monitoring and management technology has improved over the years. However, many monitoring suites still have the feel of that same old wood paneled station wagon trying to pass as cutting edge by bolting on after-market modules. At some point, upgrading the next generation solution is the best way to go – a solution that was built from the ground up to include all “standard” enhancements as well as the most recent breakthroughs.

Imagine as an IT professional being able to view each user’s transactions – when they started, how long they took (or are taking), where they went or are going, and if there is a problem, being able to quickly localize the problem and get the transaction back on track. This enables a shift from worrying about whether a transaction will complete or have drastic variations in the time it takes, to managing cost, assuring security and delivering superior user experience. One day all of these capabilities will be delivered “standard.”

Business Transaction Management (BTM) is a big step forward in this area.  BTM allows IT to provide users a better trip and to deliver more value to the business – all this without one having to be one part planner and architect and one part master mechanic.  That doesn’t mean we won’t look back and remember the days of “all hands” calls with nostalgia.

we know our users are complaining, we know we are losing business, we have been trying to identify the issue for days, I am losing credibility, I missed several friends dinner, I work every weekends, I have to leave the office now because I have to jump on a change management conference call while driving with the kids screaming in the back of the car. I have other things on my plate, like launching our new private banking services, budgeting for new servers to address our merger with ABC company, I need to grow my business, we can’t even have a feel on how our services behave nor identifying simple problem such as one out of five times the browser hangs when entering employee badge number. The assumption I made last week on where the problem might have been are now wrong, the change management team applied a patch against that specific application and the problem didn’t go away. I am stress and tired…. I am stress and tired…. I am stress and tired…. I am stress and tired….

IT experts would say: “I have tools several, several, several, several tools, and it is true after triaging all the alerts, the tools were able to isolate issues but I really just care about what impacted my users in company ABC. What is the behavior of my most revenue generating transactions today and what will it be after we merge the two companies’ systems next week, how would I know if it improves or degrades the overall business service?”Familiar with THIS?  What if you would take a peek at introducing Business Transaction Management (BTM) into your IT process?

You would finally see at this moment the IT consumers and IT producers of business transaction information, knowing whom and what is impacted, focusing only on the most important services. What if you knew the exact flow of the information and the behavior of your special revenue generating credit card application transactions? BTM is a source of rich IT information.  It is much more than incident management, you can not only understand the current behavior and plan for growing your business you can see the impact on your services of an unplanned or planned change.

This is the cure to resolve the “THIS”, today, tomorrow, next week, on a constantly changing fluid IT environment. Really who could have predicted that you would transact business via text messages?  With this information on hand feel free to use those specialized tools and apply them appropriately to isolate granular application components issues but change the way you think about managing IT,  It is not always about technical components. Now, I won’t cure all your stress and fatigue as there always be screaming kids, traffic, lines at the coffee shop but one less thing to worry about, getting a little more of your personal life back, one more thing to proudly walk to your management and really feeling good that you know the “THIS” at every moment of the day and I guarantee you will be grooving along a Disco song….

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