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.

My father once taught me an important lesson whilst he was arguing with a waiter in a restaurant, something along the lines of “The customer is always right”. In fact, it was only recently I used the exact same phrase whilst interacting with the security staff at EL AL airport check-in. After a few puzzled looks, baggage checks, several questions and two stickers I was on my way. Anyway, my point is that customers are generally a good indication as to whether something is good, bad, useful, different or valuable.

In the last year I’ve sat with several Fortune 500 customers who have ALL told me that BTM is changing the way they utilise their APM investments. In fact, two of these customers actually shared with me their IT service delivery and support processes so I could see with my own eyes where BTM and APM were playing a key role towards the common objectives of improving end user service levels, performance and availability. Simply put, BTM was used to identify, alert, prioritise (understand business impact) and isolate issues whereas APM was then used to understand root cause and resolution of these issues.

For example, in real-time BTM could detect a user specific transaction that breached in the application, it could then provide an immediate latency breakdown across all tiers where that problematic transaction traversed. Once the latency is isolated to a specific tier the customer can then focus their APM solutions to that tier and understand the root cause and apply a fix. The net result of all of this is that Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) or Recovery (take your pick) is significantly reduced. One BTM customer dropped MTTR from 2 hours to under 15 minutes using both BTM and APM effectively together.

User’s experience transactions, its therefore important that BTM provides you with visibility of every transaction from every user across every tier so you can focus your APM solutions in seconds to the tiers that are causing issues. When your application spans tens or hundreds of tiers you need to isolate the right haystack before you start looking for that needle.