Mike Vizard, a blogger for IT Business Edge, has been covering enterprise IT issues for 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWeek, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review. We spoke with Vizard to get his take on the state of IT management and the cloud.

Precise: How would you compare the top three IT issues from when you first started covering the space, to today?

MV: In a way, it’s more of the same. In the ’80s, it was all about PCs, outsourcing, and packaged apps versus custom apps. Today, it’s BYOD, Cloud and SaaS. If you think about that, it’s the long march toward self-service and IT consumerization. IT is starting to figure out that they aren’t about owning the factory anymore but orchestrating services.

Precise: Do you think IT people are happy about that change?

MV: That depends on their level of enlightenment, which is not necessarily tied to their age.

Precise: What do you think the “IT department of the future” will look like, over the next one to three years?

MV: The orchestrations will take place across multiple tiers, and it will all be tied to the value of the service. If it’s not core or it’s not used much, it’s probably going to go external. For an application that’s a true business differentiator, it will likely stay on-premise. In the past, all data was managed equally but now, IT is going to need a better understanding of the value proposition. The business people will also have to engage IT. Both parties are equally responsible for the relationship, but the IT guys often get caught in the middle and may unfairly get blamed when something goes wrong. A lot of people are looking toward the new generation of “millennials” to bridge the gap, but that will take time.

P: What about size? Are smaller IT departments here to stay?

MV: Size is no longer a metric of the value of IT. The number of administrators required has scaled to levels that no human being can handle, so companies need to rely more on IT automation. IT staff will need to operate at higher levels of extraction, with more reliance on tools instead of manual labor and custom scripts for managing servers.

P: And, the CIO role? How is that changing?

MV: The CIO has to focus on getting value from information, and the metric is the mean time for decision-making in the business. Today there are three different types of CIOs–the IT guy who moved up, the business guy who moved over and the consultant who comes in from the outside. None of those models are cutting it because the role needs to bring together equally the business and IT expertise.

P: Is the Cloud really all it’s been hyped up to be, in reality?

MV: I think there is a lot of noise around Cloud but beneath it there is new technology and some new ways of managing IT. Cutting the signal to noise ratio is hard but if you look at cloud computing and draw a line in the sand, it’s about the way we used to manage IT and here is how we will do it moving ahead. IT needs to rethink the way they manage, and adopt more sophisticated tools and technologies to do it.

P: What do you find most annoying when talking to vendors about their products?

MV: Vendors are increasingly acting like they are the center of the universe and they want to control the stack. So you have Cisco, HP and IBM all trying to win the full stack in the name of efficiency and cost savings. That doesn’t reflect any kind of reality. They have an assumption that somehow or another 50 years of IT investment is going to disappear. The situation is that we have multiple platforms and they all need to be optimized. Vendors need to recognize that they are part of an ecosystem and they should do better at making their products work with others.

P: Finally, what do you predict will be deemed the “next big thing” in enterprise IT, once the topic of cloud computing has settled down?

MV: The next big thing will be getting to the business value of the convergence of Big Data, mobile and cloud. We’ll go from conversations on the latest gee whiz technology to stepping back and saying–how do all these new technologies change my business end game. The company that’s close to doing this is IBM, but so far no one is really stitching it together end to end. The industry needs more open frameworks to make it happen. Those frameworks are at best today, rudimentary.

Why do companies need APM software? The answers will vary, but mostly it’s to keep users happy and productive. Sometimes those users are employees who need reliable access to data and reports to better serve customers. Other times, the users are the customers themselves, who will quickly defect to a competitor if they cannot use a product as it was designed or expediently conduct transactions on your website. Here are just two examples of how Precise helps its customers improve application performance, reduce IT spending on troubleshooting and infrastructure management and help drive business objectives.

Global Cosmetics Company

Cosmetics, like fashion, is a constantly-changing industry in which customer behavior and desires must be frequently analyzed to guide product development. One Precise customer, a brand-name cosmetics company, is expanding into markets such as South America, and needs technology that can scale without compromising performance for business users around the world. The company has two major Oracle data warehousing applications, one in the United States and the other in the UK. Employees use the applications to gain intelligence around sales, performance and customer buying trends.

The company had experienced consistent problems with batch processing in the applications, specifically, delays in loading data to the application. As a result, business users were not receiving critical reports when they needed them.

Precise began by conducting an assessment to baseline the performance of the Oracle applications, and then with its longtime partner EMC, developed a storage-tiering strategy. The analysis indicated that upgrading to EMC VMAX technology would deliver significant performance gains and also demonstrated which data sets could be tiered down to existing EMC devices, depending upon business priority. The ability to concretely understand “just enough” technology investments is critical for small and large IT departments today, which are grappling with greater demand yet have static or declining budgets.

The infrastructure and application teams were excited to know that with Precise, both teams can now see the same data and metrics around performance, instead of having to use different solutions and then correlating the data. Beyond expected performance improvements in batch processing, the company’s new infrastructure will be able to support the consolidation of data needed to effectively expand into new markets through the help of ongoing, proactive performance monitoring.

Medical Device Enterprise

When you’re selling products to doctors and clinicians, they better be simple, easy to use and powerful. While medical professionals are increasingly technology savvy, they can’t afford delays when trying to retrieve and analyze patient information. A large maker of medical devices was having trouble with an application it had developed for its physician customers. The application, which makes patient cardiac data available over the Web, had been running poorly for some time and physicians were unhappy. It was taking too long to access the data, which the application was collecting from implanted cardiac rhythm management devices. To make matters more complex, the device maker was using several point solutions to monitor its IT environment — none of which were adequate for monitoring database performance and storage performance.

The medical device company was in the middle of developing a new version of the application to resolve those issues, but it needed to help users now. Through the help of Precise, the company was able to optimize its environment for the old and new version of the physician software and develop a process to manage quality of service during and after migration.

The IT department deployed Precise as its core APM software, delivering a consolidated, end-to-end view of application issues and a more reliable solution to keep its end-customers productive on the job.

Over the coming months, we’ll be sharing more stories that demonstrate how Precise is working in different industries to help companies gain the maximum value from their enterprise applications.

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.

Applications are easier to use and access for people these days, but still IT needs to ensure they work well and fast. These are the kind of issues that we like to write about and discuss:

Mobile apps

Developers and IT managers need to take a different view when it comes to managing mobile applications. Precise writes about it for APM Digest. Here’s an excerpt: “In the mobile world, IT needs to determine how to efficiently and accurately trace the transaction to a single user’s device — no matter whether the device runs Android, Apple iOS, Windows or something else. That requires a new approach to monitoring, and possibly, new tools and processes based on user-centric experiences.”

The Cloud

Vendors love to talk about how great the cloud is, while the press loves to tear it down. There’s a little bit of truth to both perspectives, of course. One of the advantages of our technology is that it can help mitigate the risks of moving applications to the cloud, by providing better visibility into transactions as they move between different infrastructure layers and virtual resources.

Here’s what Precise Executive VP Zohar Gilad had to say in an interview with Virtual Strategy: “The CIO is between the rock and the hard place. On one hand, IT needs to keep grinding down the infrastructure unit cost by moving to virtualization technologies. Meanwhile, IT must keep enterprise applications running smoothly, all the time. Enterprise IT customers realize the inherent risks in moving to the cloud, and they are willing to pay for managing that risk. It’s kind of like having insurance for the 24X7 performance of your cloud applications.”

Gilad provided a slideshow for Baseline, with 10 steps for migrating to the cloud. Here’s the first step: “The traditional server-centric monitoring approach is no longer relevant. Focus on applications and transactions instead.”

IT Management

What does the CIO do all day? A little of everything and more. This Precise-authored article for CIO.com looks at how CIOs are becoming more like supply-chain managers, with the advent of the cloud. If that sounds like a dry job description, it’s not: “Since IT knows exactly how much it’ll cost to roll-out a new app on the cloud and can test it in a few hours, they can respond exponentially faster to a new, urgent business opportunity. The advent of the cloud could make the CIO’s job that much more meaningful to the business.”

What have you read lately that changed your thinking about application management and performance?

By Zohar Gilad

Many CIOs that we work with are entrenched in virtualization and cloud computing projects. Some of our customers will make a full transition to the cloud sooner rather than later. Enterprise focus on cloud computing has surfaced a myriad of issues over the past few years, including concerns around security, performance, reliability and governance. But perhaps the most interesting topic of all is how IT organizations will, and are, adapting. Will it be transformational for IT departments, or a mere tweaking of priorities and processes? I suppose it all depends upon how business and service-aligned the IT department is to begin with, which does vary widely these days.

One thing’s for sure: the cloud will keep IT departments lean. Certainly, IT organizations have been shrinking over the past couple of years due to the economic downturn. The cloud, with its focus on externally-delivered applications and services, will virtually guarantee this new status quo. No longer will IT organizations need to employ developers, system administrators and support staff — or they will maintain a skeletal staff of those individuals, farming out the bulk of technical work to third parties. Individuals with business and analytical skills, communications skills and financial management skills will be sought out by the CIO.

But what about the CIO role?

Will he or she lose clout, if all of the “IT work” and technological innovation takes place outside of the company? Hardly. In fact, as this CIOZone author maintains, CIOs will ultimately be responsible for the management (and success) of cloud services in their companies. The author goes on to cite a survey of 257 enterprises conducted by Information Today Inc., revealing that IT executives are increasingly taking on a leadership role in identifying and managing both internal and external cloud resources for their companies.

With public cloud services so easily attainable through the Internet, CIOs will need to drive the company’s direction on cloud computing -lest tech-savvy managers chart their own course, unbeknownst to IT. Writes one technology executive, in a discussion forum on eBizq.net: “I think the CIO has a new responsibility to get out in front of any procurement activity within corporations. Random acts of shopping by LOB leaders may result in cloud resources being procured without the blessing of the CIO. I think this is a recipe for disaster. Any and all computing resources need to be governed by the CIO/Architecture Board for an enterprise. Otherwise, the fragmentation and entropy that plagues so many IT shops will extend into the cloud where there is even less control.”

Beyond governance, CIOs will need to keep a sharp eye on service levels and other metrics. When the cloud buckles under the strain of users or ill-configured applications, all fingers will point to the CIO, who will need to come up with answers quickly. Relationships with vendors and service providers will be key to stay on the same page — and the CIO will have to be a masterful negotiator when it comes to managing cost and deliverables.

So what’s fun about all this? Will CIOs enjoy cracking the whip on vendors and pushing back on marketing managers who want to sign up for new public cloud services at will? Actually, things could get a lot more fun for the CIO. No longer hindered by the daily grind of managing and maintaining applications and network connections, he or she can actually get in front of the business more often and make things happen. This contributor to the Cloud Computing Journal, paints a grandiose picture of the CIO’s future in a recent article:

“Freed from the shackles of mundane tasks, CIOs now have the opportunity to step back and think more like a CEO. They can start to examine where they can drive revenue and reduce costs. How can current technologies be optimized to benefit the organization?”

This future might still be far off, but there’s certainly no reason to believe why the above premise won’t come true. Cloud computing and services-based IT is already forcing many enterprise IT departments to change the way they operate, procure technology, and work with business counterparts. Hopefully, CIOs will view all of this as an opportunity to change the game of IT in a positive direction — working for and with business leaders to drive positive impact on customers and revenues.

Gilad is Executive VP at Precise.

By Precise

We spoke by phone with Julie Lockner, senior analyst and vice president with ESG, to get her take on the latest trends in data management. Lockner is a leading industry expert in the structured data management market, focusing on database and database management, data warehouse and business intelligence, and transaction processing solutions. She shares her views on the top data management challenges for IT today, and why CIOs need to plan ahead for “Big Data.”

Precise: What are some leading trends in data management right now?

JL: Data analytics is among the top five priorities for IT as businesses are looking to be more competitive, lower costs and drive revenues. I am particularly interested in how Big Data will have an impact on existing data analytics processes and platforms, and how companies that have already invested in Oracle and other architectures plan to integrate Big Data analytics systems. Newer frameworks like (Apache) Hadoop are about processing massive volumes of data using standard server-grade compute clusters. Another trend of interest is the rising importance of performance and the need for more real-time analytics. In surveys, when we ask about IT challenges for managing databases, performance is one of the top three issues. When you are handling and processing more data, performance often suffers.

Precise: What’s your view of “Big Data” and what does this mean for CIOs?

JL: The term originates back to the open-source search engine project called Nutch that was intended to better index big data volumes. Today, it means much more. Vendors began to take advantage of the term and have applied it to storage, networks and analytics. At ESG, we define Big Data as a data set that exceeds the boundaries and size of normal computer processing. The boundary is vague, because today it might be 2 terabytes (TB) of data but in time, that will change. If you’re trying to run a process and the data set is large enough so that you cannot get the results when you need them or if you have really complex data sources or content with complex or non-relational structure, you may need a different approach. If you just add CPU to solve the problem that can get expensive very quickly. Using a grid-based or cluster based compute environment is much cheaper from a capital expenditure perspective. CIO’s need to recognize when their data volumes are starting to affect performance and IT’s ability to meet business’ requirements in a timely and cost effective manner.

Precise: What’s the role of Hadoop in Big Data?

JL: Hadoop is open source software comprised of a map-reduced programming framework and a distributed file system storage foundation, HDFS, which takes large data sets and stores it across a cluster. MapReduce takes a program written to run on Hadoop and runs it where the data is located rather than moving the data to the computer. You don’t need any special hardware. The advantage is that you can do multiple tasks at once. I like to give the example of a tour bus that arrives at McDonald’s. If there is only one person taking orders, it’s going to take a while before you get served. With more people working the counter, the tour bus of people will get served faster. If you brought the servers onto the tour bus, the people never have to leave their seats. Along the same lines, using Hadoop, you can serve many “orders” at once without moving the data, which is a lot more efficient when data volumes are massive. A common characteristic of organizations which adopt Hadoop is that they have hundreds of databases and hundreds of terabytes or more of database data.

Precise: Hadoop is a free open source development platform. So what are the associated costs of using it?

JL: It can be much more cost effective than adding databases and hardware if the application and data is suited for a Hadoop-based application. If the data needs to be transformed unnaturally and processed or analyzed all at once, you could spend $1 million on an Oracle system versus something like $300,000 on a Hadoop cluster. You will still incur development costs to build the application and support it, and there is risk associated with developing an application that is based on an emerging platform. Finally, the number of skilled developers experienced with large-scale Hadoop deployments are still low, compared with the population of Oracle DBAs.

Precise: How is Big Data and Hadoop affecting the vendor community?

JL: Just as with Linux, vendors will start to develop their own flavors. IBM, Oracle, and EMC will build their own versions of Hadoop. Server vendors will end up making a big play here and storage vendors will have integrated solutions.

Precise: What will be the relationship between Big Data and application performance management?

JL: If you put more data on the same infrastructure, performance suffers first. APM will help identify applications that are starting to buckle under processing demands, and which may need a different architecture. As Big Data frameworks become more pervasive, APM vendors will need to provide extensions to these frameworks in their dashboards. In the short term, IT may need another monitoring tool for Hadoop, but ideally, they’re going to want a single performance management solution. APM vendors will need to adapt to those requirements and support technologies such as Hadoop. My next research project will be about how IT will incorporate Big Data strategies into their existing infrastructure. How will they manage these environments and what new tools will they need? Right now, it could incur significant costs for an organization to take on one of these projects. Research and government organizations have been doing this for a long time, but it’s all new to businesses. Will there be a payoff? That’s what I’d like to find out.

By Assaf Sagi, Product Manager of Applications, Precise

The market for mobile apps in the consumer world is now established. But when it comes to the corporate world, we are still taking baby steps: that is bound to change and fast. Companies are beginning to develop their own internal app stores, and scrambling to determine which legacy apps should go mobile.

A recent survey by Evans Data Corporation found that 74 percent of developers said they would extend enterprise applications to mobile clients in the coming year, as reported in eWeek. The survey also found that 84 percent of mobile developers consider performance to be more important than power consumption when designing their applications, eWeek reports.

This is telling: developers understand that given the “instant-on” culture of mobile computing, in which consumer apps start up at the touch of the screen and work as expected all the time, performance is paramount.

Last week, I wrote about some of the key considerations for IT when it comes to monitoring and managing mobile applications. They include multi-location access, scalability, changing application development standards, complexity of defining transactions, and more.

Clearly, IT managers need to think differently when it comes to managing mobile applications. Yet the practice of mobile application performance management is still nascent; as more critical applications move to mobile clients and the cloud, we will gain a deeper understanding of exactly where mobile APM should focus. The uber issue is that most enterprise IT departments have limited visibility beyond servers. Soon, IT will need to determine how to efficiently and accurately trace the transaction to a single user’s device — no matter whether the device runs Android, Apple iOS, Windows or something else.

Here are a few considerations for mobile performance management.

1. Application optimization. Now more than ever, companies need to design their websites for optimal mobile performance. Many enterprise applications today, particularly legacy ones, don’t run well from the mobile Web. Best coding practices for supporting mobile clients include minimizing the number of “round trips” or the requests from client to server such as client-side redirection and loading only the content that the user needs to see right now, often called “lazy loading.”

2. User-centric performance tuning. Adding mobile apps and devices into your performance management strategy requires a change in the way you analyze performance data. Today, organizations largely review server-side (back-end) data to analyze application issues but with mobile apps, they will need more granular data to resolve issues. From the narrow angle of the server side performance, response times may seem fabulous. In reality, due to inefficient website implementation (e.g. multiple roundtrips) or a slow network, users may suffer. IT organizations must learn to bring in the real end-user experience into the loop when analyzing performance issues.

3. Baseline user experiences by platform. A fundamental tool in the arsenal of the IT performance troubleshooter is baselines. When you compare current performance with baseline performance, changes and exceptions pop out immediately and provide a big hint as to what has changed. If you’re not using baselines today – start experimenting with them. The advent of consumer IT means that organizations are supporting multiple different platforms across the user base. The consequence is that there is no such thing anymore as a single transaction baseline. To compare apples to apples, application monitoring must be segmented by platform (e.g. LAN user, mobile user) so when things go wrong you can locate exactly the problem spot.

4. Proactive alerts. With so many more different potential issues and devices to monitor, a sophisticated alert system based on trend analysis will help IT keep all the balls in the air. Ideally, IT should be aware of the potential issue before it becomes a problem. What is the threshold for each device and operating system, after which performance will likely begin to suffer? Alerts can arrive in e-mail, by text, and within the application management dashboard, so that application and database managers can be proactive.

By Assaf Sagi, Product Manager for Composite Applications, Precise

Like it or not, consumer IT is all the rage. And by that, we mean the uncontrollable surge in use of mobile devices and consumer sites such as Facebook and Google Docs in the workplace. Gartner, like many other research firms, predicts that tablets, mobile devices and social media will be top strategic initiatives for IT in the near term, according to ZDNet. Naturally, consumer IT is creating more havoc for IT managers while also delivering CIOs the power to affordably innovate again.

The good news: Supporting any number of devices and applications, and even developing enterprise app stores, gives business units and information workers new capabilities and flexibility. User-friendly, consumer technologies help businesses connect with customers in creative, highly interactive ways to drive additional revenue streams and increase customer loyalty.

Infrastructure and application managers, however, are now juggling a lot more balls when it comes to platforms. Given the rapid development of new mobile and Web-based technologies and services, scenarios change daily. “Tablets will be a key issue for tech execs largely because security and management issues abound,” writes Larry Dignan in the ZDNet report. He continues: “One exec told me that those issues are much larger for Android devices. With Apple, there’s iOS and you know what it is and how to secure it. Android has various flavors to defend.”

Enterprise application managers will need to consider the impact of mobile computing on application performance across the organization. Here are a few considerations that CIOs and their teams will need to plan for ASAP:

1. Multi-location access. Users are accessing corporate networks and data over many different networks–from home, the airport, over corporate or public cloud connections–making issues harder to research and locate. This is great for employees but creates a higher incidence of unexpected use patterns as more people log on during unpredictable hours and from unknown locations.

2. Scalability issues. The mobile world also means that organizations are experiencing more transactions than ever before, from both employees and customers, resulting in larger volume and erratic spikes in demand.

3. Instant on. Thanks to the Apple App Store, users want instant satisfaction and no glitches, and they are getting accustomed to ditching apps that are not perfect. What happens to a company if people begin to ditch the critical apps managers need them to use on the job, because they aren’t responding fast enough or working beautifully? This is raising the bar for enterprise application performance standards and usability.

4. App dev standards in flux. If applications are being developed differently for mobile/cloud– HTML 5 for instance is known for its support of mobile caching — that could mean more complex challenges in monitoring and troubleshooting app performance.

5. Multiple versions of the same application. Typically, a corporate site is accessed from a variety of devices, yet each obtains a different version of the same URL. This complicates performance management, since it is not enough to know that you have a performance issue with one URL. You need to know which platforms accessed it, what was the unique user experience for each, and what business logic was invoked as a result.

6. Obscure definition of transaction. In the old Web 1.0 world, a transaction was simply correlated to a Web page. When Web 2.0 came along with richer experiences, enabled by AJAX, a user’s transaction would not necessarily switch the page. For example, consider how many different actions occur on a single page with Gmail. With mobile and tablet applications, it is even harder to define transactions. A “pinch zoom” movement on an iPhone may trigger several URLs on the server. It’s not easy to group several such transactions into a single business event when analyzing the performance of a user complaining about “slow zoom.”

Undoubtedly, mobile business is already top of mind for many application managers. Enterprise IT departments and their technology partners will have to work together to determine how best to support this new segment of users and applications. Maintaining the status quo for application performance isn’t a good option, because employees and customers now have much more power when it comes to information technology. They won’t use a technology or application if it doesn’t work well — or else they will misuse it and the company will miss out on the ROI or somehow disappoint customers. That’s just a risk that no company can take today. What are your thoughts on mobility and how it is changing the practice of application performance management?

By Tim Gifford, Federal Account Executive, Precise

Universities provide IT services to a complex and diverse user community, often distributed across broad geographies. Like any business, they closely monitor application response time across offices and campuses and the performance of key revenue-driving transactions such as student applications and class enrollments. The online component of universities is taking a predominant role, with more and more classes offered on the Web. This requires around-the-clock reliability of websites and underlying applications.

Despite the critical nature of a university’s IT services, they typically have relatively small IT departments and less budget for managing systems. They don’t usually have specialized IT employees to focus on a particular vendor or application set. Delivering value from software is even more critical, because a university may rely upon just a few major applications.

To address these requirements, many universities have selected PeopleSoft Campus Solutions as a core application for comprehensive management of university business functions, and to deliver a 360-degree insight into their students’ experience. The software manages many aspects of a university’s business, including recruiting, admissions, enrollments, student records, academic advising, payments and financial aid.

Precise works with universities to help them get the most from these packaged software investments by supporting the performance tuning and end-user experience management of the deployed system. Many universities implementing packaged solutions without proper performance tuning encounter unexpected slow application response in some areas. This is irritating to end-users at best, but can negatively impact service levels at worst. In some cases, universities must disable high-resource consuming transactions, which cuts the expected value from their software.

Precise’s Application Performance Management (APM) solution identifies performance problems in real-time, isolates the cause, and provides recommendations to address the service disruption. By working with universities, we help resolve performance issues and allow customers to experience full value from the IT investments. This is a win-win. The IT department can focus on more pressing user issues, and the university can receive the full benefit of their software investment.

Another core value of using Precise in the university setting is the need to track performance and application use at the campus level. This is especially important when supporting multiple campuses so that IT can understand if one location is having unique issues. The use of Precise reduces the time to respond, saving money and a lot of hassle for IT, and helps users get back up to speed more quickly.

University customers have told us that Precise TPM was the only performance management solution that could give visibility into all four PeopleSoft tiers, including Tuxedo. They further commented that Precise was unique in its ability to trace end-users who submitted a transaction to the activity on each tier.

We love hearing this feedback because we understand the importance of PeopleSoft in higher education. This software helps universities run more efficiently, while providing online services to students and facility; that’s critical in today’s difficult economic environment.

Precise for PeopleSoft provides role-appropriate, at-a-glance summarized views to help university management, IT administration teams, and help desk support understand the state of the application, anticipate potential problems before they effect students and facility, and minimizes the staff needed to manage the application. For more information, contact: sales@precise.com.

Have you always wondered if you could improve the performance of your SQL Server databases, but weren’t sure how to do it? We’ve got a risk-free proposal for you: download the Precise for SQL Server Trial. It’s a 30-day trial with no obligations to purchase and no fees. Here’s what you need to know:

1. Precise for Microsoft SQL Server offers the following features: It correlates SQL statements visible within the database tier to transactions executed on top of Microsoft SharePoint Server, .NET applications, and other applications running on the IIS server. The software monitors individual SQL statements and breaks down the performance of stored procedures written in T-SQL or C#.

2. Precise for SQL Server can monitor these versions: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP1, SP2, SP3; Microsoft SQL Server 2008, 2008R2, SP1

3. Precise is both a QA and production-level solution. Most customers will use the solution in both environments, tuning performance under load in QA, and then using the solution in production operations.

4. The performance data that was collected during the trial period will remain in the Precise repository. You will no longer be able to review the data once the trial is over, unless you purchase the product. In addition, data will continue to collect until you stop the collector agents. If you choose not to purchase the software at the end of the trial period, you will need to uninstall the product to stop data collection. There is an uninstall program located in the file directory.

To learn more, read the FAQ, or contact sales@precise.com.

If you’re ready, you can download the trial right from our website. We’d love to get your feedback!