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.

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.