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

OpTier announces a brand new product capability called OpTier Business Events module.  Built around a Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine, the new module will monitor real-time business transactions and give enterprises the power to make rapid, proactive and well-informed decisions about business critical activities by providing continuous intelligence.

The Business Events module for OpTier BTM monitors real-time business transaction, end-user experience event and third party data from a variety of sources. As scenarios develop that require immediate attention, business rules alert IT and the business to the developing situation.

Listen to this exclusive iBlog interview with OpTier CTO, Amir Alon on: what is the value, why is OpTier adding this new module, what are the challenges it is addressing and how is it different to other B-level solutions such as BAM and BPM.

Interview: iBlog interview with OpTier CTO Amir Alon

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 

Business Transaction Management (BTM) this year became 5 years old. It’s currently the new kid on the block and has subsequently forced many APM vendors to switch their strategy to focus on a more business centric value proposition around business transactions rather than their legacy of monitoring IT silo’s. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find an APM vendor these days who isn’t talking about business transactions and their crusade around “End to End” performance management. From my perspective BTM 1.0 has been delivered to the market and I’m very much looking forward to contributing to the next generation of BTM capabilities, let’s call it BTM 2.0 for arguments sake.

BTM 1.0 in my opinion was about providing visibility of all business transactions across all tiers all of the time to allows customers to manage IT from a business perspective. BTM 1.0 implementations typically focused on a single mission critical application or “business service” (if we’re looking at things from the business perspective) in a production environment where business impact is real and pain is felt the most. Customers who experience BTM 1.0 see things they’ve never seen before, this is why more and more IT mgmt vendors are keen to develop or acquire BTM capabilities. Whilst BTM 1.0 is coming to market nicely I’m already thinking of the future and where BTM is heading.

BTM 1.0 - End to End for an Application

For customers who thought BTM 1.0 was good, things are about to get better as they’ll be more unique visibility on the way with BTM 2.0. Why? Because customers are telling me they want to see the complete picture of their inter-connected business services (and if you’ve read my previous blogs – the customer is always right). The pervasiveness of Service Orientated Architectures (SOA) has been very visible from the customers I’ve been chatting to. Combine the last five years of SOA with customer’s recent consideration around cloud computing and you really begin to understand why complete visibility of inter-connected business services along with their dependencies is becoming critical to IT mgmt.  When a business service relies upon another business service or several business services customers need complete visibility of these dependencies so they can understand and manage the business services and business transactions that is really impacting their end user experience and ultimately their business. Without this visibility customers today are managing their business services in a silo’d approach which is fine if youe business services have no dependencies with other business services or they don’t run on a grid, utility or shared services environment. If they do have dependencies, run on shared services or are distributed across data centres and/or in clouds then they’re going to need good visibility in order to manage them effectively. This is where I believe BTM 2.0 will help customers; once again helping them see things they’ve never seen before so they can make smarter decisions and manage IT more effectively with complete visibility of how the business runs on IT. When a business transaction is executed by a user the customer should have full visibility of how that business transaction interacted with other business services and the infrastructure which underpins them. Seeing a complete jigsaw is better than seeing the pieces individually laid out, in my opinion BTM needs to provide the complete jigsaw view.

BTM 2.0 - End to End for the Enterprise

I’m looking forward to making BTM 2.0 happen with our customers, tracking business transactions across one business service is done, tracking business transactions across multiple business services is where it’s now at. End to End is about to shift from the application perspective to an enterprise perspective and I can’t wait to see what topologies we’ll be drawing for our customers over the next 18 months.

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.

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

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

EbizQ Podcast: Decluttering IT with Colin Rowland

Recently, I gave a webcast with Forrester analyst, Ellen Carney, on insurance trends, IT spending priorities and the implications on IT management.

In this webcast Forrester shares some brand new findings about the insurance industry:

• The need for competitive advantage is driving key IT decisions.
• 89% of the respondents and decision makers put high importance on improving the speed of business process and transaction execution.
• 91% say the pressure to reduce costs continues to be a priority.
• 85% say regulations and compliance also continue to be critical for insurance firms.

iBlog Insurance Initiatives

To view the recorded webcast: http://bit.ly/9l497w

I’ve been in the IT management/monitoring space now for almost 6 years. 6 years might not seem a lot but from what I’ve experienced not a lot has changed in the application performance management (APM) market. I glanced at the Gartner MQ a few weeks ago and the same old (and they are old let’s be honest) players were there in the leader quadrant, these vendors being HP, CA, Compuware and Quest. Leaders are normally people I aspire to be like or follow, they should inspire, excite and as their name suggests “Lead”, they should innovate and make the customers life easier. Please therefore excuse my sarcasm while I take a few seconds to think of all the innovation and inspiration these companies have given me…1 millisecond pause…right moving on.

The APM market from what I’ve seen over the last decade was driven from two needs a.) Database Performance Management and b.) J2EE Performance Management. Sure you had things like Road Runners and Profilers but those things were more used in dev/test rather than production environments where pain and business impact were real. And so database and J2EE performance management solutions came to market around the late 90’s with the premise to manage “application performance”. The simple fact is that these solutions were never built to manage applications across the enterprise, they were built to manage pieces of applications (e.g. JVM’s and databases). They became a victim of their own success to a large extent, they were fine at managing up to 100 database or J2EE nodes but they never really provided customers with that “End to End” application or enteprise view. The only end to end view they could provide was the end to end within a Java Virtual Machine (URL to SQL, Servlet to JDBC) or a relational database (SQL to Objects), many tried to correlate J2EE activity with database activity and failed, some succeeded but even seeing J2EE to database calls is not true “End to End” unless you ignore things like web servers, authentication servers, ESB’s, Mainframes, Message Brokers , 3rd party web services calls and other tiers which applications environment still have but are not covered in general by today’s APM vendors.

Yes, many vendors tried to expand their “End to End” coverage and acquired new technology in the space of end user monitoring, synthetic transactions & change mgmt but those solutions were never truly integrated together to make the customers life any easier. The result was a monumental jigsaw puzzle (known as the “APM suite”) held together with super glue and string. These giant jigsaws were put together and managed with professional services and support departments, all of which cost the customer money, patience and frustration. It’s therefore no surprise to learn that these vendors have spent the last 4 years re-writing their architectures to make all the bits work together. The bad news is that most of these vendors forgot about the most important piece of the jigsaw: business transactions.

I recently interviewed around 20 enterprises in the last 6 months for a project I’m working on. The purpose of my research was to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of today’s APM solutions. Pretty much all of the enterprises I interviewed already had solutions from who Gartner classified as “leader”. Therefore you’d expect to hear how APM was transforming the lives of customers and helping them generate more ROI than a city banker (pre 2008). To my surprise the results weren’t encouraging or good, the feedback I got was consistent and almost desperate from a few enterprises. APM solutions were great from a feature and data collection perspective but the physical effort, resource and investment to deploy these solutions was prohibitive. Too many moving parts, points of failure and pieces to deploy, configure, manage and support. Many of the people I met spent more time administering the performance of their APM solution management servers than their own applications! It seems many APM solutions just grew up to be big expensive monsters that were so impossible to manage many customers simply gave up, not because the solutions weren’t any good they just didn’t have enough time and patience to install and configure them across their portfolio of applications. When you’ve got to manage multiple applications across several hundred servers you want to be managing your applications and NOT your APM solution. That is unless you want to work long hours with many sleepless nights.

So what caused this response from enterprises? Well, by nature these APM solutions collect a lot of data to satisfy the needs of the technical people who develop and manage each and every application and database. Everyone has their own way of solving problems which is why you need thread metrics, JMX metrics, OS metrics, session metrics, invocation metrics, JDBC metrics, I/O metrics, CPU metrics, heap metrics, process metrics, SGA metrics, locking metrics, metric this, metric that, my favourite metric, his favourite metric, her favourite metric, my dogs favourite metric and so on. I think many APM vendors lost track of what is relevant when it comes to managing application performance and availability. They focused too much on monitoring application components rather than these things called business transactions that make their customers business run on IT. Customers care about their business, they don’t care about individual JVM’s, databases or other tiers. If the business is hurting they want to know the when, who, what & why so they can make it stop hurting. It’s about time IT was able to feel the business hurting and act accordingly rather than responding to infrastructure alerts, events, log files, exceptions and CPU spikes.

I’ve noticed now a lot of APM vendors talk about business transactions and are moving into the business transaction management, transaction performance management and business transaction performance space. This is a very good thing for customers, maybe we’ll finally see some innovation to help customers manage IT based on the needs and priorities of the business rather than JVM’s or Oracle databases.

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