Sherman Wood, VP of Products for Precise, has been delivering technology products and services to global markets for over 25 years. His expertise spans across product management, marketing and as a technical architect. Prior to Precise, he was VP Engineering and Product Management for the service sales division of Synnex called Concentrix, which he joined through the acquisition of Encover Inc. Sherman was also Director, Business Intelligence for Jaspersoft, a leading open source business intelligence company.

Precise: There’s been much ado about cloud computing in the last two years, yet many organizations are still knee-deep in managing their current enterprise IT investments – data centers, databases, applications, ERP and storage. Is it tough for companies to straddle both worlds?

Sherman Wood: Enterprises have committed to the cloud message of using virtualization to increase services and scalability, while at the same time optimizing budgets. The success of SaaS, such as Salesforce.com and Netsuite, is based on enterprises moving en masse to the cloud. But there are few organizations that can completely rely on SaaS services now, as they have existing processes and data that either are not available as a SaaS service, or not immediately replaceable. A typical scenario I have seen is organizations that use Salesforce.com for CRM connecting to their internally-hosted ERP system, like SAP.

So organizations have committed to integrating SaaS and public cloud offerings with their internal systems. They are expanding services to employees and customers, while reducing their infrastructure costs. At the same time, however, they are also increasing the complexity of their environments and their set of vendors and touch points. It is tough for organizations to manage cloud environments, but the increase in services they can offer and cost savings is making the complexity palatable.

Precise: What are the biggest problems that Precise customers discuss when it comes to managing the IT environment?

SW: The amount of business running through the IT environment – transactions, emails, web pages served – has a direct relationship to revenue and operational efficiency of the organization. Time literally is money. Performance needs to be visible and understood, so it can be controlled and doesn’t slow down the pace of business. Some of the things that customers often tell us include:

• I don’t have the complete picture or “performance intelligence” that I need.
• What parts of my business are the most important? What should their service-level agreements be? How can I track those SLAs?
• Where are the root causes of performance problems–in the network, application, database, storage, connections to the cloud and external service providers? And what exactly is going on within those areas?
• How do I fix those problems?
• How much should we spend on performance? We can add capacity or bandwidth to improve performance – but is this worthwhile?
• The organization and the IT environment change all the time, and so performance changes. How do I keep up?

 Sherman Wood is VP of Products at Precise.

By John Kelly

Previously, I wrote about how companies don’t have adequate visibility into transactions from a business perspective. IT can’t tell which transactions are high priority when troubleshooting issues, which means that companies aren’t consistently allocating the most critical data to the fastest Flash storage arrays. This week, I continue that discussion with a look at batch processing, also known as repeatable work flows.

Many years ago, batch processing was scheduled for off-hours while on-line transaction processing (OTLP) ran during normal business hours. Batch processing and OLTP coexisted just fine. But with the onset of global ecommerce, the concept of off-hours no longer exists.

Applications need to be up and available 24×7 and they need to simultaneously handle batch processing and OLTP. To address this challenge, organizations deployed clustering or replication strategies to separate the different data demands on the application storage subsystem.

Fast forward to today: organizations are in major cost-cutting mode. Server consolidation is now putting extra pressure on storage. As a result, IT has deployed enterprise flash drives (EFD) to lessen the demand on the storage subsystems.

Conflict of interest: batch v OLTP

Let’s take a look at a batch job for a banking application. Every day at 5pm EST, a calculate interest batch job kicks off. But during the execution window of the job, online users are still accessing the bank application to pay bills, transfer funds and so on. This creates a unique bottleneck that stresses the storage subsystem. Prior to the start of the batch job, the online user transactions are executing against data that is typically on EFD. Once the batch job starts, batch data becomes hot and is promoted to EFD, while the OLTP data downgrades to the fiber channel. The data movement typically takes several minutes to complete. As a result, the batch job gets off to a slow start. The opposite effect occurs once the batch job completes and the batch data takes several minutes to move off of EFD. The later issue is a silent killer.

Immediately after the batch job completes, if a user complains about transaction performance, IT will look at what’s currently running in the system. IT will only see OLTP running and will have a hard time understanding the root cause of the performance issue. To avoid this problem, IT must develop a just in time (JIT) storage-tiering strategy. Both pre-staging and re-staging of batch data is critical to maximize transaction performance.

In large companies, batch processing-related performance issues are common and complex, since IT is often running many batch jobs simultaneously. Managing all those workloads and moving data back and forth between storage drives is sometimes too much of a manual, error-prone effort. Often, IT wastes too much time trying to determine what happened with performance levels, and if the batch job was the culprit. How do organizations effectively manage this?

Automating JIT is the answer. Precise can help IT departments automate JIT and make decisions more proactively about when to pre-stage and re-stage data. Our software understands workflows and business prioritization from managing transactions over time.

With an automated JIT strategy, batch processing and OLTP can once again coexist peacefully.

John Kelly is the Chief Architect at Precise.

By Assaf Sagi

It’s not uncommon to find a single DBA responsible for hundreds of different database instances. As companies increase efforts in Big Data initiatives, the problem will only worsen. Asking DBAs to deliver the same level of service to all transactions and applications isn’t logical. In the words of TV psychologist Dr. Phil: Does that make sense? No, it doesn’t.

It’s time that companies figure out how their DBAs and application managers are going to manage this growing volume of transactions, applications, databases and shifting business priorities. The answer is part technology, part process — and probably part culture.

Let’s say I am a DBA responsible for five hundred instances; each of the instances I manage may have a performance problem or two. This amounts to an overwhelming number of problems, alerts and blinking red lights that I need to analyze. How can I pick my battles?

Traditional application performance management (APM) tools focus on the technology silos rather than holistic end-to-end business context, and therefore don’t give advice as to where the DBA should focus his efforts first. For instance, the transaction that runs the longest may seem to be the culprit but it’s not necessarily the most critical transaction in business terms. Too often, the squeaky wheel gets the grease–but the business does not benefit if critical transactions are handled the same as less-critical ones.

APM systems need to do a better job of delivering business context along with the performance data.

Here are two examples:

1. SQL Statements: DBAs typically tune SQL statements. However, SQL statements rarely give a good indication of the transaction’s importance. So how to choose what to tune and what performance trade-offs to accept? APM tools must provide the business context here, enabling the DBA to view each statement and table in terms of which applications and end-user transactions (including from mobile devices) invoked them, and what was the overall response time. With this information, for example, the DBA may avoid working hard to tune a SQL statement that ultimately amounts to only 5% of the overall end-user transaction performance. Similarly, the DBA may choose to focus on a statement that is being run by the most important business transaction (e.g. quote to cash), even if it is not the heaviest statement on the database.

2. Indexes: Sophisticated DBAs often focus on tuning objects, such as tables, rather than individual SQL statements. Suppose I want to add an index to a table. Typically, some queries would run faster as a result, while others may actually suffer. Tables may be accessed by both important and trivial transactions. It’s hard to know whether the trade-off is acceptable without understanding the business context of the affected transactions. So, if one of the affected transactions is a batch process that runs at night, then it’s okay if performance lags a bit. If it’s a critical online transaction that directly generates revenue, then it’s not. Having the business context allows the DBA to make informed decisions and ensure that the correct trade-offs are being made, thereby improving the overall performance of the business.

Connecting the business perspective to the database silo does not just help DBAs focus their attention and scarce resources on the business priorities. It also facilitates teamwork and common language between the silo teams. For example, when the Java admin walks to the DBA and asks why  the ‘withdraw funds’ transaction is slow, the DBA could connect this immediately to the set of SQL statements and DB objects which participated in the transaction, and examine their performance and overall contribution to the business transaction. Similarly, the DBA can approach the application team and point to a specific transaction that throttles the databases by throwing too many queries at it.

There are many more examples of how IT is forced to manage performance in the dark, without the necessary insight into transactional importance to make the right decisions for the business. In future posts, we’ll talk about how IT managers can have a broader, more contextual view of application performance management.

Assaf Sagi is a Product Manager at Precise

By John Kelly

It’s all about “Big Data” in the enterprise today, right? Your company has a lot of data, and it can gain a competitive advantage through harnessing it properly, goes the theory. But wait: first, take a closer look at your storage. If you don’t understand how and when your data is being moved around to various storage devices, user performance will suffer. Before you come up with a big data strategy, make sure that you are managing your storage devices effectively, based on business priority.

Here’s an example to illustrate a common problem in IT. Let’s say that a company sells video game sessions online. When a user selects a game and begins playing, they expect the game to load in a few seconds. So clearly, that process needs to have fast storage behind it to fuel a speedy transaction.

At the same time, the video game company has a background billing system to charge the player’s credit card after they purchase game time. That process doesn’t need to be speedy: it just needs to execute. But do your storage devices know the difference? Enterprise flash devices typically prioritize on high-use transactions. So, when there are a lot of billing transactions to process at once, that data may move over to the Flash drive and subsequently, the game search and load processes downgrade to a slower storage array. Now, it’s taking users several minutes to load games: Not good. Will they go somewhere else to play video games? Maybe.

Consider how this scenario could mirror what’s going on inside your business. Do you even know that storage is to blame? When customers or internal users begin to complain about performance, that’s when the finger-pointing begins. You may not have the slightest clue that your storage policies are responsible for these performance malfunctions — but I can tell you that the lion’s share of Precise enterprise customers struggle with properly managing storage.

Nearly half of our customers don’t even know they have a problem with storage at all: It’s a silent killer. In fact, research has shown that 75% of application performance issues directly relate to databases and storage devices. Without knowing exactly which transactions are suffering, and which should be prioritized according to business needs, sales will suffer and/or internal productivity will go downhill. That could mean up to millions of dollars in lost revenues and opportunities for a large company.

What companies need instead is business context when managing these expensive storage arrays. As data volumes have grown exponentially inside the enterprise, IT has increased its investment in high-speed Flash devices to keep up with the demand. But clearly, to manage costs, IT still maintains slower storage boxes for lower-priority applications and transactions. This is all positive, because new storage technologies help IT deliver information faster and more efficiently to users. Unfortunately, visibility now suffers because data is constantly moving around between different devices, as demand fluctuates. Where’s my data? That’s not an easy answer anymore, compared to just a few years ago when data was locked down to a storage box.

A typical setup for storage might look like this: 60% of enterprise data is running on SATA drives, 30% on Fiber Channel drives and 10% on the super-fast Flash devices. Data management is more intelligent, efficient and cheaper, because you don’t have your most expensive technology managing data from a backend application that’s not mission-critical or transactions that don’t require five-second response times. Yet, how do you define “hot” data–that which needs to run on the Flash devices? Throughput and IOPS are not the only answers.

A Better Way: Business-Contextual Storage

A company needs to understand the business prioritization of its data to make the best decision that influences policies. There may be transactions that run very infrequently but when they do, they are paramount to the business — such as quarter-end closing of the books. That’s when your policies need to kick in and ensure that those transactions are running from the fastest storage arrays.

The only way around this issue is to track transactions down to the storage device. That helps IT determine if storage is indeed the culprit to slow performance, so that they can modify storage policies to match the business priority of those transactions.

Precise helps companies discover this business context, by monitoring transactions from client browser down through storage arrays. Our software gives the IT manager granular visibility into the performance of a search versus a billing transaction, for instance. If you’re looking simply at time and activity metrics, but not the business transaction priority, you’re going to miss out on the complete picture of application performance management.

Just a couple of years ago, IT directors could care less about storage. It was a box, and you set it and forgot it. But now, storage has become a strategic IT priority, along with “Big Data” and analytics. I wouldn’t say that storage is sexy, but it’s definitely a rapidly-evolving technology that needs detailed oversight. By doing so, your company can gain a real competitive advantage.

John Kelly is the Chief Architect at Precise.

Sandra Gittlen is a freelance business and technology writer in the Boston area, specializing in enterprise IT, analytics and CFO topics. She has been covering technology since 1995, and is a frequent contributor to IDG’s CFOworld, Computerworld and The Magazine Group’s FedTech, StateTech and EdTech magazines. Her blog “The Fusion of Finance and IT” appears frequently on CFOworld.com. Today, she talks with Precise about the need for closer IT and business alignment as companies migrate to the cloud.

Precise: Here it is, 2012, and people are still griping about a lack of IT and business alignment. What’s your take on progress on this in the last few years?

SG: I think virtualization has put IT in a better space regarding business alignment. All of a sudden, you have virtual resources, which are more of a collective asset. Now you can buy a big storage array shared by three departments, instead of dedicating three separate machines for each business unit. So there’s got to be a lot more communication between IT and the business to reserve the proper resources. IT is not just a department buying a bunch of infrastructure any longer; they are responsible for a whole enterprise-wide game plan. IT has become a much more strategic job. You have to make sure that your data center doesn’t hit capacity, and that you are investing in targeted technologies and resources.

Precise: When did you really see things changing for the better?

SG: In the past couple of years, I have seen the most positive change. Even companies that aren’t necessarily resource constrained, they’re doing centralization to take advantage of virtual servers and storage, and moving away from departmental IT. So IT has been naturally elevated to become a business partner. I would also credit Big Data, as the business is now understanding the importance of data to the organization. There’s a lot of top-down positive influence between business and IT in the savvy companies. They really get it that business leaders have to talk to IT and IT has to talk to the business. IT now has discussions; they’re not merely taking provisional orders.

Precise: Now, we’ve got the cloud and the whole move to services-based IT. Is the urgency for alignment stronger?

SG: If a business unit marginalizes IT out of a cloud decision, they will get a non-technical agreement with a vendor. I think it’s a very bad practice to exclude IT from decisions. It’s a dangerous move because you may start with a very basic plan, like signing up for a cloud CRM, but what happens when you want to add analytics? IT already has an analytics system and now they have to try and integrate that with your CRM, but IT had no clue into what you as a business manager did in selecting and setting it up. This just makes everyone’s job harder. That message of going to IT before signing up with a vendor has to come from the board room. Look at what happened with Megaupload. This is a bad situation where a provider shuts its doors and now IT is responsible for that data that’s out there somewhere, but didn’t know about. These days all data is critical to someone. It happens all the time that business units don’t want to wait for IT because they have a critical project they want to get going immediately. The board room message is that you don’t go to the cloud without IT. Business managers may not know about industry regulations such as HIPAA for healthcare, so going off on their own can become a compliance issue. Marketing may not know about the specific security requirements for a database they are shipping out to the Internet. Ultimately, IT is on the hook for maintaining standards and protection of data, and I think that business maybe needs to have better respect for that.

Precise: In some ways, the CIO’s power has decreased – he/she no longer “owns” the technology. The CIO might be seen as less of an innovative leader and more of an overseer. Does this give the IT department less credibility in the eyes of the business?

SG: I don’t think that a lot more work is being done outside of companies, but a lot more grunt work is being outsourced. IT may not be watching monitors and updating PCs but the overall strategy, the inventory, the integrations–all that is staying inside. The good news is that by being more strategic, it frees up a lot of mind power which brings competitive advantages. CIOs still own the technology roadmap.

Precise: In your conversations with CIOs and IT managers, are they excited about this shift?

SG: The ones who are already gaming for a seat at the board are excited. Most CIOs don’t like the nitty gritty. IT directors may be less on board because their server rooms are dissolving into the cloud. They might be threatened by that. But that’s where the CFO, CEO, and the CIO must explain that we are moving from tactical to strategic. And on the tactical side, there’s still a lot to do. You’ve got a primary focus in most companies on analytics, virtualization, the cloud and blending all of this together. And of course there is still some infrastructure to manage. IT still has the holistic view of the business, who are the users and what they’re doing, and they’re making the calls on where enterprise resources will be spent in the cloud. So in my view, IT has become more elevated in the business today, not discounted.

Precise: What are some of the characteristics of companies that are doing a decent job of aligning business and IT and bringing all of these pieces together into a cohesive strategy?

SG: First, IT has to come out of the reactive mode and sit at the table. They need to be actively invested in business unit decisions. If marketing is starting a huge new campaign, the first person they should call is the CIO or the senior IT director. These campaigns are driven by technology, and IT can help. Secondly, IT needs to be open about accepting outside technologies and devices. They need to be willing to build a solid plan for mobility. But they don’t have to say yes to everything. In fact they definitely should say no to some requests. Next, they should get savvy about contracts, and educate the business units. Business managers need to know how the organization deals with service providers and what clauses should be in contracts, such as the acceptable amount of downtime. There’s a lot of pressure on both IT and the business units to manage risk in the cloud.

Corporate culture is also important. I’ve seen some government agencies where one involves IT in decisions and the other does not at all. It’s more of a mutual respect and frequent communication between business leaders and IT that organizations need.

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.