Picking a game wrong in your bracket can greatly impact your ability to win your bet or office pool. A similar situation plays out daily in IT in regards to business critical applications. Hundreds of alerts indicate a service degradation and looming failure. But in the case of IT, where does one look to assess the impact? From a Business Service Management (BSM) perspective, the answer is the service dependency map. This article will compare the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament with BSM challenges that are met by Business Transaction Management (BTM).

The annual NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is currently underway. It is better known as “March Madness”. In 1981, CBS bought the rights to the air the tournament for an average of $16M per year. According to an ESPN Outside the Lines report, in 1999, CBS inked a new contract for an average of $545M per year, which is an increase of ~3300%. According to a TNS Media Intelligence article, the ad revenue for the NCAA Tournament in 2007 was $520M, second only to pro football for post-season ad revenue for US sports. Bottom-line, this is big business. But why does the NCAA Tournament create so much interest and passion? In large part it is due to the way people can analyze, bet on and track the tourney using the bracket.

The tournament is composed of 64 teams broken down into 4 geographic regions of 16 teams each. This year’s starting bracket was as follows:

There are 63 games with two outcomes each (team A or team B wins), which yields 263 combinations of potential outcomes, which is more than 9 quintillion (9,000,000,000,000,000,000). (See more on this calculation at The Math Forum @ Drexel, “NCAA Tournament Possibilities”).

With so many combinations, you never know what can happen, hence the madness. However, there is a map to guide you through the madness – the bracket itself. You can track the outcome of each game and your status (winning/losing) at any point in the tournament. The bracket is living entity for the duration of the tournament and contains only the most important high-level information – who won the game and perhaps the score. (Noticeably absent are lower level metrics such as Possessions, Field Goal %, Fouls, Turnovers, etc.)

In the word of information technology, there are many potential paths a transaction can take in even a (grossly) simplified application topology such as this:

In this example, if you assume all transactions start at the first logical tier, there are 32 (2*4*2*2) possible transaction paths. That doesn’t seem so bad at first, but then consider that each transaction must be considered individually as well. If an application handles 100,000 transaction per day (many applications handle that many per minute) then there are now 3.2M combinations of transaction and path. Even a simple example represents a daunting challenge. This challenge arises precisely by adding the transaction dimension to the application topology. BTM answers this challenge.

BTM adds the transactional dimension to BSM (which is absent from configuration management databases (CMDBs)). It also provides high level metrics (transaction response time, transaction chattiness and transaction specific resource consumption) that combine with the living topology to provide the map view akin to the bracket for the NCAA tournament. This transaction map can be used in real-time to make sense of the madness – which makes it the backbone of outage avoidance and problem isolation capabilities. Additionally, BTM enables proactive capacity planning and performance optimization efforts. Together with the more detailed, domain-specific data and statistics captured as part of BSM, BTM enables better service level management, change and configuration management and more.

When investigating and evaluating BTM solutions customers often focus their investigation on how transactions are tracked (and thus how the living topology is generated). While the methods of transaction tracking are of paramount importance, of equal importance is how the data and complexity are processed, analyzed and managed server-side. The combination of capturing the right data in a transaction context and being able to analyze that data across multiple dimensions defines BTM as an evolutionary step in BSM – one at the center of BSM itself.

Millions will enjoy “March Madness” for the few weeks it dominates the American sports landscape. For IT professionals, every day year round brings new and dynamic challenges. BTM provides the map and analysis to bring sanity to the madness.

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….

As a vendor of BTM solutions, we know what our costs are, so that part of the equation is fairly simple to figure out.  Trying to put a dollar amount on the value of BTM is where things get trickier.

The common way of quantifying the value is breaking it down into value points that derive from the different ways customers use BTM.  For example, practically every user who deployed a BTM solution in Production has been using it, among other things, to prevent application outages.  If we can determine the monetary cost of an outage – and we can – and if we can show that BTM has reduced outages by a certain percentage (or eliminated them entirely), we will be able to calculate how much money was saved by deploying BTM for outage avoidance.

And outage avoidance is just one of the many use-case scenarios for BTM.  Virtually everyone who implemented BTM has also discovered how useful it can be for problem isolation and resolution.  Just like with outages, it is possible to measure or estimate the cost of the problem determination and resolution cycle.  If it can then be demonstrated that the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) for performance issues dropped by 70% since a BTM solution was implemented, we can add this windfall as another component in the total value of BTM.

We can come up with more use-case scenarios for BTM and estimate how much money was saved in each one of them.  BTM can cut costs by improving processes such as application optimization, QA testing, SLA management, capacity planning, activity-based costing, application consolidation, and more.  Each one of these cost savings can contribute nicely to the bottom line value of BTM in an organization, but does this total really represent the value of BTM for the organization?

I hereby propose that it does not.

If we examine all the different scenarios in which BTM is used, we can see one common element and that is that BTM provides a new level of visibility that did not exist beforehand.  BTM allows IT to see things that they could not see before.

Consider this analogy: Nine year-old Jack is a vision-impaired kid who, for the first time in his life, gets a pair of glasses that allows him to see clearly.  How much are the glasses worth to him?  We could point out that with his new glasses on, Jack successfully avoided an incoming car as he was crossing the street and saved himself from being badly injured or worse.  Also, Jack now spends only 30 minutes a day doing homework whereas before it used to take him well over two hours.  Furthermore, Jack’s family can finally move out of their expensive house, which has special amenities for the vision impaired, and into a regular house.  This will cut down their rent by almost 20%.

Each one of these observations can be translated into a dollar amount, but is this getting us any closer to determining the true value of glasses for nine year-old Jack?  What about the fact that for the first time, Jack can see what his parents and sister look like?  His amazement when he found out that his cat actually has one blue eye and one green eye?  His pride at finally being able to read books and watch TV just like the other kids?  Isn’t Jack getting far more value out of these simple discoveries and accomplishments than from having to spend less time doing homework?

BTM is a game-changing technology. Being able to see transactions clearly enables IT to stop “flying blind” and start making informed decisions that take service management to the next level.  Just like Jack with his new glasses, once IT starts using BTM regularly, they can no longer manage without it even for one day.  What, then, is the real value of BTM for an organization?  The question will remain open for now, but I can tell you that much – it goes far, far beyond just being able to avoid outages and fix problems faster.

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The aha moment occurs when a prospect or customer first sees the auto-discovered topology of their own business transactions.  They now have visibility they never had before.  They know where the transactions went.   They understand fully what is meant by “transaction tracing.”  They can see the overall topology – all business applications and transactions, or a specific transaction such as “Policy approval,” as well as see individual transaction instances.

This new visibility is powerful for the information it provides, but the aha moment wouldn’t happen if it required transaction modeling or data definitions to generate the views.  The fact that the transaction topologies are discovered automatically is key to the epiphany. The additional value of capturing the business context of each transaction, the roundtrip and segmented response times, as well as resource consumption finally leads to the statements: “Wow, now I get it – this is BTM.  There’s no way I can get this information today. This is the view I really need.”

So why do prospects need to see BTM working live before fully appreciating it?  I think this is due to the fact that most people in IT have heard the transaction tracing story before.  Either they’ve tried to do it themselves via a coordinated development effort or they have tried to integrate a suite of products together – none of which was designed to do BTM.  So now they’re skeptical and gun shy.  Seeing the automatic discovery of transaction topology and flow changes this.

For now this initial challenge will remain.  It may be a while until there is a better answer to the questions and doubts than: “Please trust me.  Let me show you how BTM works with your own transactions.  Seeing is believing.”

Head over to the press release on OpTier.com to learn more about the research.