Online Banking, Still Open for Business!
By Jonathan Williams
A recent incident at a customer site illustrates how OpTier BTM can play a crucial role in detecting, isolating and remediating performance issues before business-critical services are severely affected.
At a large UK bank, OpTier BTM is used to monitor the central internet banking application. With 4 million business customers using the bank’s site, OpTier monitors over 40 million transactions every day. During a recent Friday morning, OpTier BTM detected a marked increase in application response times as well as a large number of errors. It was absolutely critical to address the issue right away, because not only was it the peak time of day, it was also the last Friday of the month – payday for many people – and the last work day before a 3-day bank holiday weekend.
As you can see in the graph above, OpTier BTM showed an increase in average service time (the blue line) and errors (black area) after 9:50 am. Because the timing was so critical, the bank decided to switch over to their remote contingency data center. As you can see in the graph, the performance improves after 10:50 when switch was made. Even after the switch, we still see some errors because a public-facing internet application it is constantly hit by incorrect URLs – from end user typos to automated Trojans and hack attempts.
While the failover was taking place, the team used OpTier BTM to isolate the cause of the problem. In the graph below, the OpTier dashboard shows a marked increase in service time for User Identification and Verification database calls from the application server. Since nearly every transaction in the application makes a call to this database – even after the user is logged in – nearly all application functionality was affected by the slowdown.
In the drill-down to an individual transaction instance, we can see that calls to the identification and verification database were taking almost 2:30 minutes to perform.
When we drill down into the topology of another transaction instance, we can see that there is a very large Inter-tier time of 1:41 between Apache and WebSphere, indicating a communication problem. This behavior is usually an indication that the WebSphere resource has been exhausted while waiting for backend availability. This would be a secondary effect of the slowdown of the database service.
With the information provided by OpTier BTM, the bank was quickly able to identify that the source of the problem was in the database, resulting in very fast problem resolution and preventing an all hands call that would have wasted valuable time for all of the silo teams (i.e. not only DBAs but also architects, Java developers, network teams, and representatives from other IT silos). The bank’s DBA quickly pinpointed the source of the problem using OpTier BTM data – one of the nodes in their database cluster had reached its session limit. Without OpTier BTM, even isolating the problem would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Thanks to OpTier BTM, the problem was identified, addressed and resolved as efficiently as possible. Customers were able to deposit their pay and – along with the bank’s support teams – enjoy the holiday weekend.
Maintaining PCI DSS Compliance with BTM
By John Aronson
May 12, 2011
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance is an important consideration for thousands of companies and an integral part of their network security strategy. But what about application performance monitoring? You need to make sure that APM, BTM and other monitoring tools are PCI DSS compliant as well.
Recently, a customer approached us about monitoring an application that executes over a million financial transactions per day. The users of the BTM system are application owners and performance specialists that need an end-to-end perspective on all of the business transactions in the application. In this case, the need is especially critical because the system was developed by a different team which is no longer at the company.
The current team needed to be able to manage the performance of business transactions, without exposing sensitive customer information to unauthorized individuals. They were aware of this issue because other monitoring tools in their environment, from respected vendors, also captured protected customer data and did not provide a mechanism for removing it – resulting in a potentially serious compliance issue.
OpTier BTM features a solution for PCI DSS compliance that scrubs transactions of sensitive data. It masks protected personal information, while leaving the rest of the transaction, which is useful for problem solving, intact. This mechanism is very simple to implement and saves the customer from having to implement a more costly solution for maintaining compliance, such as auditing all BTM users for application access and/or moving the database to a tighter security zone.
Below is an example of how the data would appear without the PCI DSS compliance feature. (The credit card number is circled in red and some of the digits have been blurred.)
And here is an example of a similar transaction with the PCI DSS solution installed. The credit card number is masked, along with names, addresses, and other protected information.
After installing the mechanism, our customer has all of the information they need in order to manage performance and ensure SLAs – while maintaining compliance with the payment card industry standard.
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.
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.
Gotta Love Paying Taxes on Time
By Russell Rothstein
March 7, 2011
We’re proud of the fact that OpTier software powers a variety of critical businesses. Every day OpTier BTM ensures that stock trades execute fast, national train lines keep on schedule, billion dollar procurement systems don’t fail, online bill payments are executed properly, mobile phone service plans are provisioned, and insurance claims are processed. And while it’s not as sexy, we also ensure that citizens are able to pay their taxes on time by managing tax return filing systems.
Our customer, a large, national tax authority, is responsible for collecting all online tax submissions each year. Since few of us prepare our tax forms in advance, it comes as no surprise that most of its traffic arrives in one giant peak just before the deadline. In fact, more than 80% of its annual traffic occurs during those 3 weeks, and 10-15% of the traffic occurs during the final 8 hours! Of course the annual peak is extremely stressful for the IT department, and in the past, there have been some painful system failures that resulted in submission delays.
This year, (we’re happy to report,) the annual peak was scaled successfully. Our customer used OpTier BTM to monitor all of the key servers, and during the final day, it was processing nearly 5 million transactions per hour. These transactions are exceptionally complex, with over 200 tiers, and OpTier BTM discovers them all automatically, which is important, since there are changes every year.
During the peak, a customized OpTier BTM dashboard is displayed on a 50” plasma monitor at all times. Around 50 people man the command center 24/7 during the peak, and OpTier BTM is always in focus.
The SOA architecture is developed by a number of different application teams and vendors, so the ability to identify where a problem is occurring and put the resolution into the hands of the correct team is absolutely essential – it saves everybody a lot of finger-pointing and arguing over who’s holding the ball. For example, in the cut-out from the dashboard below, the red block shows a slow-down in the performance of the back-end services. By isolating the problem, OpTier BTM can reduce the time spent on troubleshooting by as much as 90%.
Needless to say, the business impact of any outage is enormous for the authority, the vendors, and the public. So the ability to identify and resolve problems quickly is crucial.
OpTier BTM repeatedly identified significant slow-downs much sooner than other monitors, and proactively identified several different types of incidents. The team also used OpTier BTM to drill down and isolate problems. In more than one case, OpTier BTM was used to halt an all-hands call, and to identify both short-term and long-term solutions.
While OpTier BTM complemented the other monitoring tools in the data center, the team appreciated its business focus and the ability to understand the user impact of IT issues. Where other monitors each showed one piece of the puzzle, OpTier BTM captured the entire picture. To quote one of their operations managers, “We need this stuff! We should be using it to monitor other applications as well. ”
“OpTier, the company that ensures you pay your taxes on time.” As true as it is, we’ll have to mull that one over again as a company slogan…
Concerned about Application Performance in the Cloud? Ask These Questions First
By Russell Rothstein
February 22, 2011
Many companies are developing their strategy for migration of business applications to private and public clouds. During this critical stage, it is vital to ensure that service levels are not impacted by migrating the application from dedicated to shared IT resources. It’s no wonder that according to analyst firm IDC, two of the top three concerns that CIO’s have about private clouds are performance and availability.
We see in the market that enterprises are forming new cloud teams and internal committees, with a diverse set of skills, to plan for an effective organizational cloud strategy. One of their mandates in the organization’s journey to cloud is to plan for how to monitor and manage the performance and behavior of applications after deployment. These organizations undoubtedly have a range of infrastructure monitors in the data center. And most cloud service providers, whether internal or external, will provide services for monitoring cloud resources. Yet these tools typically do not provide an accurate picture of what end users are truly experiencing and how to quickly isolate and fix performance issues in application components located inside and/or outside the cloud.
This blog entry points out a few of the key application performance challenges that you are likely to encounter when pursuing a cloud strategy, so that you can address them proactively. I hope that during my session in the Cloud Performance Summit at CloudConnect (Instrumenting Applications When Access Goes Away on Monday March 7) the esteemed panel will address some of these challenges with a variety of perspectives – it should be informative and thought-provoking!
1. How do you know if an application is ready for the cloud?
Not all applications are ready for “cloud time”, and sometimes one part of an application is cloud ready while other components are not. You need to identify the best components for migration as well as potential problems such as chattiness and latency that are amplified in the cloud.
2. How do you find server-related root causes when performance issues arise?
In fully-dedicated environments, we sometimes use infrastructure metrics and events to diagnose performance issues. But inferring application performance from tier-based statistics becomes challenging – if not impossible – when applications share dynamically allocated resources. In the cloud, you must be able to understand application performance and its correlation with the underlying physical and virtual components.
3. How can you minimize the risk of change to the cloud infrastructure or the application?
In a shared environment, any change to the application, or to the infrastructure, is high risk. Cloud owners, operations staff and application teams must be able to test the impact of change on service delivery – whether that change is in an application before deployment, or in the cloud infrastructure.
4. How do you implement or verify chargeback?
Traditional application performance monitoring (APM) tools do not collect resource utilization per transaction to enable business-aligned costing and chargeback paradigms. For the cloud, you need a solution that monitors consumption for every service across multiple applications and tiers, so you can accurately cost services, decide on appropriate chargeback schemes, and tune applications and infrastructure for better resource utilization and lower cost.
5. How do you ensure that services are allocated according to business priority?
To ensure that SLAs in the cloud are met, you must be able to prioritize the allocation of resources based on measurements of real end user performance and an accurate view of where additional resources can truly alleviate SLA risks. To make that possible, you need a clear picture of resource consumption at the transaction level and business intelligence about the impact of each infrastructure tier on performance.
6. How can you maintain a real-time up-to-date view of how each service flows through the cloud when VMs are moving around dynamically?
In the cloud more than ever, you need a real-time picture of service dependencies that does not need to be manually updated. The environment is simply too dynamic (e.g. so called “VMotion sickness”) to make it feasible to keep manual models and static infrastructure dependency maps up to date.
7. How can you right-size capacity and prevent over-provisioning that undercuts ROI?
In the cloud, a complete history of all transaction instances, including precise resource utilization metrics and SLAs, is essential for making intelligent decisions about provisioning. And with an accurate picture of resource consumption for each business transaction, cloud owners can plan future capacity requirements (e.g. servers, storage, VMs, databases) in the most cost-efficient manner possible.
February 22, 2011 at 3:47 pm Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
How Clouds will change Business Transaction Management
by Anonymous, January 2011.
I hate clouds, they generally deliver cold weather and make life dull. I especially hate them even more because they’ve recently made my job more difficult (and working in product management it’s not exactly plain sailing at the best of times). I did try my best to avoid Cloud Computing by simply pretending it was all madness. Sadly, this naive approach didn’t work and here I am writing a blog on the subject.
For anyone whose tried to decipher cloud computing I will hereby explain what the Mary Poppins is going on and how it’s going to impact IT management and specifically BTM over the next few years. I will start by saying that things are going to get more complex and significant challenges are ahead for vendors who are looking to provide next generation IT management software. There are several acronyms you need to understand as well so I’ll get cracking:
Private Clouds – think of these as on-premise utility/grid computing with the virtualization of OS and application run-time environments across the enterprise. An example might be a grid of 500 J2EE servers which are virtualized and shared across hundreds of different applications within an enterprise.
Public Clouds – this is simply off-premise utility computing provided by a 3rd party vendor. For example, Amazon EC2 or Rackspace where businesses can buy computing resource on-demand which are accessed remotely across the internet (hence it being public).
SaaS – Software As A Service. Enterprise Applications that are hosted on the internet by a 3rd party vendor. For example, Salesforce.com, Success Factors or GoogleMail where businesses log into a website that provides them with specific services that aid their business.
PaaS – Platform As A Service. Application Run-time platforms that are provided by 3rd party vendors across the internet. For example, Google App Engine or Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. The ability for business to build new applications using 3rd party frameworks or run-time environments. For example, many businesses will store their customer data within Salesforce.com, using AppExchange they can build new applications on top of this data.
IaaS – Infrastructure As A Service. Essentially the same as Public clouds where businesses can buy servers or computing power on demand from a 3rd party hosting provider.
Hybrid Cloud – combination of all of the above.
- More complexity on the way
Some of the above is probably common knowledge and I’m betting someone will comment on this blog telling me the above descriptions are not entirely accurate. The key problem with the above is that enterprise applications are going to become more fragmented and distributed across multiple deployment platforms which are not all controlled by the customer. To add to this we’ve just had a decade of SOA projects which essentially increased the number of dependencies between applications so when a user executes a business transaction these days it’s likely to pass through several application architectures. Why is this important? It multiples the complexity and demands of IT management software which up until now has still struggled to monitor and manage single applications let alone multiple connected applications. In summary a blackbox application becomes a blackbox of blackboxes with multiple points of failure and dependencies. Visibility of how the business (transactions) executes across these blackboxes therefore becomes key to effectively managing the business and IT. Business Transaction Management solutions will be key to providing this much needed visibility across the many types of blackboxes regardless of whether they’re in a data centre, in a cloud or being managed by a 3rd party vendor. You can only manage and control what you can see, as many enterprise applications move to the cloud its critical customers maintain their visibility of how their business executes across IT.
CEP doesn’t have to be complex
By Anonymous, January 2011.
One of my favourite sports is Formula 1. For the unfamiliar it involves 22 cars racing flat out at over 200mph with drivers bums 2mm from the ground with many of them crashing and going up in flames (see below). It differs from traditional Nascar racing in the fact it has these things called “corners” which make it more tricky for the drivers to overtake. Formula 1 is a big business with many teams spending over £150 million plus a year to make their car faster than everyone else. It’s a global sport with significant sponsorship, TV revenue and an opportunity for car manufacturers to compete. To say business impact doesn’t occur in Formula 1 is pretty much the same as saying no-one gets hurt in boxing.
All Businesses can go up in flames
So how do these teams minimize business impact and make their cars finish races? Firstly they have a lot of talented people whose job it is to design, develop, test and support these cars that cost £1.5 million each. Secondly they are experts in monitoring and improving one important metric: performance. Each car has 2,500 metres of wiring and over 250 sensors which continuously monitor the performance of car components in real-time. The data from these sensors is often known as “telemetry” which are fed into a computer and then analyzed by test or race engineers. Over a race distance millions of events are captured from each car and are used by the pit wall to help their cars finish the race. Engine temps, tyre temps, brake wear, hydraulic pressure, tyre pressures, brake temps, clutch wear – the list is endless. The job of the race engineers and their computers is to spot which events matter so they can take pro-active action (Complex Event Processing). They make definitive decisions to directly increase the performance and reliability of their car so it can finish the race as high as it possibly can. For example, if tyre pressures are low it could mean a number of things from a simple slow puncture to a problem with the brakes which is causing tyre temps to drop thus impacting tyre pressure. The last thing a Formula 1 team want to do is pit their car so they need process and analyse multiple events to make the right decision. Just like failing businesses go out of business so does Formula 1 teams with the recent departures of BMW, Toyota and Honda.
A formula 1 car must be fast and reliable for its team to be successful. The same principle can be applied to any business out there that has mission critical applications or business services. Slow performance and outages have a direct business impact. The only difference is that there is probably a lot more wiring (networks) and sensors (agents) used to monitor every angle of an application through the various OSI layers. Complex Event Processing engines add significant benefit to gaining meaningful real-time intelligence from data that is collected. It allowing monitoring solutions to become smarter with the data they collect and present, it also makes monitoring solutions aware of data from other sources that may explain why specific events are being observed. For example, if an application tier goes down the monitoring solution may throw an alert. However, if this was planned downtime or a change request then the tier outage is perfectly valid. With CEP capabilities it’s possible to build simple rules that prevent false positives and alert storming. For example, a CEP engine can process a tier outage event and then query the change management repository to see if downtime is planned, if not it can then alert to say the tier has been verified down. This is just a very simple example of how a CEP engine can significantly enhance traditional IT monitoring solutions.
In fact, the power of CEP is exactly why OpTier recently introduced its Business Events module (BEM) so our customers can gain better intelligence into what is impacting their business. In the same way we use the market leading Oracle database to persist our data we use a market leading CEP engine to process events from the millions of business transactions we collect each day. For every business transaction captured we know which application, business process, user, location, tiers and protocols it touched along with the KPI such as latency, resource and SLA for those respective entities. So if a user from an unauthorized IP subnet executes a business transaction we can detect it in real-time and notify the application security team. Again, just a simple example of how CEP capabilities can enhance Business Transaction Management.
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 29th 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!
Cloud Requires a New IT Employee (Hint: MBA May Be Required)
We've come a long way since the IBM 3270. Or have we?
By Russell Rothstein
December 6, 2010
In today’s economy with sluggish job creation, there’s much talk about the change in skills required in today’s workforce. Drill down into the world of IT operations management, and there is an even greater shift happening, related not to the economy, but to cloud computing. The rapid adoption of private cloud architectures is creating ripple effects, not only on the way IT delivers services to its customers, but also on the types of skills IT requires to support these new architectures.
Cloud computing is heralding the most significant shift in IT skill sets since we displaced the armies of punch card operators with the IBM 3270. Cloud is a realization of utility computing, where whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand. As Gartner says in a recent report, private cloud services “will require a cultural and political change inside of IT to see the role of operations move to being more proactive — requiring predefined policies, service levels and automated actions to take on the runtime environment, as opposed to the manual initiation of scripts or workflows. This requires very different skills over time — a shift away from rote work toward more planning, service analysis and a better understanding of service users in order to continually improve how the service is ultimately delivered.” (Source: Gartner “Key Considerations in the Development of a Private Cloud Architecture”, August 23, 2010).
The key phrase used by Gartner is that IT personnel will require “a better understanding of service users”, which means a better understanding the business which is what’s driving the users to consume those IT services. In essence, cloud will necessitate IT to be more business focused. We have been talking about Business/IT alignment for too long now without sufficient progress; with the emergence of cloud models, this is no longer a choice – either IT upgrades to a business-centric service delivery function, or is ultimately to be replaced by outsourced cloud service providers that can provide utility computing services with greater cost efficiencies. That’s why Business Transaction Management, or BTM, must be at the center of your cloud management capabilities, in order to effectively plan for and manage cloud services from a business perspective. In an upcoming blog post, we’ll get the opinions from CIOs in the industry to understand their plans to address this rapidly changing environment.
To close up, it’s interesting to understand the new roles in IT that Gartner sees as emerging in order to support the delivery of new private cloud services:
- Cloud service architect (new role): Designs and documents the end-to-end cloud platform
- Portal developer: Develops interfaces that cloud consumers use to requisition services
- Workflow specialist: Defines requirements for instantiating automated processes
- Configuration management specialist: Develops consistent packaging and policy-conflict-free service deployment methods
We trust you are already filling these roles in your IT organization. And while these may not be the best the job in the world, but they most certainly beat a career as a roustabout.
December 6, 2010 at 3:14 pm Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
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