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.