
Jim Rapoza, Aberdeen Group
We spoke with Jim Rapoza, a Senior Research Analyst with Aberdeen Group in Boston, about application performance issues as relates to enterprise cloud strategies, mobile applications and a few emerging developments in IT. Rapoza has been using, testing, and writing about the newest technologies in software, enterprise hardware and the Internet for 17 years. He served as the director of eWEEK Labs and has won five awards of excellence in technology journalism.
Are companies paying more attention to application performance these days?
JR: APM has become a lot more important for customers today. This area shows up very high on our surveys and this increase in interest relates to the change in how apps work in the cloud and on mobile devices. When I talk to companies they want the applications to run faster, and they are not interested in buying eight different point products. In the past, the network guys would buy network optimization products and the application developers would buy APM. But this is now all merging into one solution, since IT departments are smaller and there are less silos. Vendors need to look at the whole picture for customers — the network, the end user experience, the application approach, and the monitoring approach.
How do hybrid infrastructures impact application performance?
JR: The most complex hybrid environments today combine private and public cloud infrastructures, managing several different operating systems. It’s pretty common that enterprise applications are all over the board. So you might be running SAP internally, but on the cloud you’re using Salesforce and perhaps hosting some applications on Amazon EC2 apps. This isn’t necessarily strategic, but large companies tend to add new applications over time and try and make it all work together. The result is that application management issues become more complex in these new hybrid environments. Therefore, the old models of LAN optimization and load testing just don’t cut it. IT needs more information, and they need baselines across all these different infrastructures. You’ve got a lot of road warriors using smartphones to access core apps, and when they have problems that becomes a huge headache to solve.
How do you see the market of cloud providers shaking up this year?
Public cloud providers such as Amazon EC2 already have a fairly large presence in the enterprise, although they usually come into play for running distinct applications instead of the entire infrastructure. Enterprises still largely look to traditional IT providers for hosting and outsourcing. Large companies want to purchase dedicated servers in the cloud with direct management and not a shared-server model, because they’re worried about security, control and data integrity.
How do these choices affect APM?
If you have a private or dedicated server cloud arrangement, it’s easier to manage application performance because you have total control of the server. You get basically the same amount of process control as if the application lived in your own data center, which means that it’s possible to touch all points of the application ecosystem and have full application performance management capabilities available. Some private cloud vendors are starting to offer application performance tools within their offerings.
With the explosion of mobile apps and devices in the enterprise, what’s the performance challenge?
Pretty soon, mobile devices will become the primary way that workers consume applications, or at least mobile will be equal with desktop applications. Getting complete mobile performance information is the challenge, and most companies really don’t know how both cloud apps and mobile apps are performing. APM can definitely help with the device madness, by allowing IT to see what mobile users are seeing and to identify performance baselines for different device types. Eventually, we will see the full mobile capability in APM software.
What are features that companies should look for in APM software as relates to mobile apps?
They need to have end-to-end monitoring and analytics on mobile connections, provide granular information to find problems, offer understanding of normal versus abnormal mobile user behaviors and have the ability to deliver alerts. Of all the APM vendors, probably less than 10% are “mobile APM” ready, and many of them are very honest about it! As well, perhaps 15% of vendors are fully cloud-ready with their APM solution.
That seems a bit behind the curve.
Many APM companies have been caught flat-footed by the cloud and BYOD and suddenly, the whole focus on apps has changed. At the same time, I do think there is lagging demand. With BYOD, most companies are really scrambling, and APM is not always the first focus. Security is the top concern for IT, though most user complaints are actually about performance. Part of the problem is that apps are developed differently for different devices. The user experience will differ on the Web compared with a mobile phone or a tablet.
What other developments this year will challenge application managers?
Here are three things I’m interested in right now:
1. Next-generation Internet. I am keeping my eye on IPv6 because everyone will have to be there in the next few years, and it will change the way IP addresses work. The IP numbers will be much longer and packets will be sent differently as well. If your APM breaks performance data into packets to monitor, the software will need to adapt to the new IPv6 packets.
2. Storage. I also see that companies will invest more in storage, particularly solid state/flash drives, because these technologies boost performance and speed. IT will focus more on storage prioritization and tiering, so that top-performing storage drives are dedicated to the highest priority applications. APM can help determine storage tiering but the software will need to have deep visibility into the storage layer.
3. Big Data. Hadoop allows companies to manage and analyze a much larger volume of data from sources such as social media and cloud apps, which is going to increase enterprise network traffic. This will push application and database performance to the limit, and APM should be able to help manage that challenge.
Rapoza writes more about these trends in the Aberdeen blog here.