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!

Air France has used Precise for the past decade to help keep applications running smoothly and passengers happy.

As the leading European airline, Air France must set the standard for service, safety and quality. The airline, founded in 1933 through the combination of five French airlines, merged with KLM in 2004 to form Air France-KLM, the largest European carrier. Air France runs at least 1500 flights every day carrying 71.3 million passengers annually, and operates nearly 600 planes.

To effectively manage that massive line-up of planes and schedules, the company relies on a software arsenal of 500 Oracle-based applications. The IT department must deliver and optimize this vast array of systems that manages passengers and flight schedules, cargo operations, engineering, maintenance, marketing, HR and financials. If they fail, the airline risks delays, errors and disruptions in service. No airline can afford the slightest damage to public trust in this economy. Fortunately, Air France is doing well: passenger traffic was up 7.6% in August, according to a company press release.

Focusing on operations is critical for any airline today, and Air France has used Precise for the past decade to help keep its applications running smoothly. The airline deployed Precise in 2000 to monitor its Oracle environment, after running into repeated database performance issues. It was costing the airline too much time and money on outside consultants to determine the source of the problems. The database issues initially occurred overnight and needed to resolve early the next morning, to avoid creating any problems for customers or critical operations.

“Precise was the only non-intrusive solution which captured all of the real-time relevant metrics about historical events to help us focus on the root cause of the issue,” says Patrick Vergne, a senior DBA with 22 years at Air France. His team of six Oracle engineers are responsible for making sure the airline’s application transactions perform at top speed and without fail.

Air France’s flight delay rate attributed to IT has decreased during the last five years, and Precise was one of the major technologies used to help improve quality of service, Vergne says. Reducing delays saves Air France-KLM money and increases customer satisfaction and loyalty.

During a period when global transportation companies are suffering on many fronts due to rising fuel costs, geopolitical unrest, and pricing pressures from the economic downturn, survival depends upon extreme efficiency. In fiscal year 2010, Air France reported a 12.5% increase in revenues to 23.62 billion euros, despite these turbulent conditions.

Air France’s flight delay rate attributed to IT has decreased during the last five years, and Precise was one of the major technologies used to help improve quality of service
– according to Patrick Vergne, senior DBA, Air France.

Since the 2004 merger, IT has focused on combining staff and reducing the overall number of applications. Air France has now standardized on Precise to manage the performance of its entire Oracle infrastructure.

As the company migrates to Oracle 10 this year, IT wants to ensure that its most critical applications transition successfully. “Using Precise means we can compare how systems are running today, versus before the configuration change,” Vergne explains.

The last few months have been a time of transition for companies virtualizing their environments. Once cloud pilots are approved, IT has to figure out how to make it all work together and work smoothly. They can’t risk a decline in service levels or a spike in application issues after migrating critical data and applications to the cloud. Those concerns are a barrier for companies that could benefit now from this new infrastructure but worry about the lack of control they may experience.

In August, Precise conducted a survey of IT managers about their application virtualization plans and concerns. After slow performance (41 percent), the second leading problem of managing applications in the cloud is slow time to identify the root cause of issues, according to the survey. Inter-application shared resource contention and multi-tenant storage contention are also trouble spots.

Indeed, another recent survey, this one conducted by Symantec, found similar concerns with cloud deployments: 78 percent of participants worried about reliability, 76% worried about security, and 76% worried about performance. The survey also found that a majority (76%) who have implemented server virtualization stated that performance was a somewhat or extremely large factor affecting the confidence of placing business-critical applications on virtualized servers, while 72 percent of organizations with hybrid/private clouds cited performance as a significant or extreme challenge.

Is there any good news here? Despite all this worrying, virtualization and cloud computing continues to grow.

A few highlights from the Precise survey include:

• In 2011, 39% of organizations moved email and collaboration systems to virtual infrastructure, followed by IT management (33%) sales & marketing (20%) finance/HR/ERP (21%) and security (13%).
• In 2012, 33% of respondents report that they will move finance/ERP /HR applications to the cloud, followed by e-mail and collaboration software (23%) and IT management applications (21%).
• Eventually, 37% of companies say they will migrate 61% or more of their applications to a private cloud environment, while only 6% of companies will do the same on a public cloud service.

Challenges persist, yet CIOs and other VPs expect the cloud to bring their companies an edge: supporting more applications or transaction volumes on the fly as customer or business managers create demand, getting more bang from their IT bucks, and enabling higher levels of service to business users.

Attaining these goals means paying close attention to the monitoring, management and security of applications in the virtual layer. Precise is making it easier to do that through new technologies and services that we’ve announced in the last year. Check out the following links for more information!

Precise TPM as a Service

Precise MSP

Precise Virtual Appliance

Precise for Cloud

Precise Solutions Architect John Kelly discusses the relationship between storage systems and enterprise application performance.

1. How does storage affect the performance of enterprise software?

It’s actually a pretty strong connection. Statistics show that 80 percent of performance problems are database and/or storage-related. The main reason is that companies typically isolate their infrastructure, placing different applications onto dedicated servers and separate networks. Storage is expensive, so companies will have one array with thousands of devices for many different applications. This can create a bottleneck as several applications fight for space. It’s like when you have three or four freeways that funnel into a downtown area. It gets congested pretty quickly. It’s important to get your database and storage people on the same page. What happens is that they will look at metrics on the storage array, and see the overall I/O rate and throughput indicators but they can’t see visibility into a specific application. This makes it really hard to quickly determine the source and priority of the problem.

2. If a company could afford to buy more storage, does that solve the issue?

If you buy the best and the most expensive storage you can, it will help, but it’s not a good return on your investment. Regardless, you will still have application contention issues. A poorly tuned application will still run poorly on expensive storage. So why spend twice as much as you really need? As well, it will be even harder to justify the extra $3 or $4 million you spent on storage, when users call about poor response times. These days, IT needs to be efficient with what it owns.

3. So Precise and APM fit into the equation somehow, right?

Regardless of what method that you use, IT simply needs more detailed, transaction-level information about its environment and where the bottlenecks reside. The different departments within IT need more data than the metrics provided by the storage array. Precise can carve out those metrics and show how each application is affected by storage. That allows the storage and database people to move applications and data around as needed, based on business priority. To make an analogy, you don’t want people who are driving 45 mph in the fast lane. Applications that need to run quickly should be partitioned to your highest performing storage boxes, such as those with Flash technology. So with Precise, you can see the business view and transaction view and then tune those applications based on what is most important to the business right now. If your website is currently running an important promotion, you’ll want to prioritize storage for those applications and servers. Sometimes the fix might be a basic database configuration, to optimize performance. Managing applications this way also ensures that you are getting the best return on your storage investments. The Cadillac storage boxes should run the Cadillac apps, not store data that is rarely used.

4. Why does Precise partner with EMC?

EMC has the lion’s share of the market for storage. As they have superior technology for enterprise storage, and excellent monitoring tools that we leverage, we began working with EMC a few years ago. EMC will bring us into accounts to help their customers solve problems and to increase ROI from the customer’s storage investments. For example, one company was doing a proof of concept with both EMC and NetApp. The company was leaning toward NetApp, but when EMC brought Precise in to analyze the environment, they saw a significant difference in the application visibility they would have with EMC and Precise together. That really sold the deal. Companies will spend more to go with EMC because they get that increased visibility into performance across their environment. On top of what EMC delivers, Precise can provide granular transaction level performance data. In the end, this can open up inter-departmental communications and eliminate costly blame-storming sessions. From the CIO to the storage administrator, everyone sees the same information and understands what’s going on from their perspective. This will strategically align IT with the business. It’s all about delivering data to the right people at the right time. In the end, the person with “precise” data wins.

Tom Doyle, Precise VP of Worldwide Sales

By Precise

The mercury rose above 100° this week in Las Vegas, but that didn’t stop tens of thousands of people from convening in the desert, for VMWorld 2011. According to Tom Doyle, Precise Executive VP of Worldwide Sales, the show has become a must-attend IT conference. “Everyone from the biggest to smallest vendors in the technology space, from hardware to software and services, has a presence here. Nobody wants to take a chance and not be at the biggest virtualization event around.”

So what’s different this year, compared with last year? Maturity of the space and widespread adoption of virtual technologies has occurred in a short space of time, Doyle says. “Virtualization is so universal now,” he says. “A year ago, people were only talking about how to use virtualization to cut costs — but now they are looking more at its impact on operations. It’s like we’ve gone from kindergartners to fifth-graders.” IT directors and CIOs this year are discussing how to scale their virtual infrastructure, increase throughput and adapt their infrastructure to the new technologies, he adds. “Cost management is still a factor but it’s not the only thing.” Virtualization and cloud computing is becoming more of a business story, and that’s a good thing for IT.

In the EMEA region, which is typically 6 to 12 months behind the United States with technology adoption, companies and organizations are close behind in the virtualization journey, according to Alf Saggese, London-based director of Precise EMEA. “The C-level people we are talking to are planning or already partially through a virtualization strategy,” he says. What’s driving the aggressive adoption of virtual and cloud computing is a still-weak economy, especially in Europe. “Countries are under severe cost pressures, and everyone needs to find innovative ways to drive out costs in their organizations and maximize level of service,” says Saggese. “If they can look at sharing resources more cost effectively with virtualization, and not have to invest heavily in their private infrastructure — that helps a lot.”

VMWorld 2011 – Precise Booth

VMWorld 2011

At the Precise booth, Saggese and others chatted with customers about how they will manage this new infrastructure. “The need for internal performance monitoring is multiplied by a factor of 10 when you go virtual,” Saggese says. “But you have to baseline performance before you embark on a major transformation to cloud or outsourcing. Maintaining high performance in the cloud is one of the biggest fears that IT managers have, and it’s holding back adoption.”

Doyle adds that enterprises with massive legacy investments in ERP or other custom applications may have an even greater challenge, because they need to centrally manage both legacy apps and more modern apps built for the Web; IT departments don’t want to use a bunch of different tools and disciplines to do so.

Explains Doyle: “This is where Precise comes in. We can monitor this whole environment, and bridge the gap between physical and virtual, from the Web to storage. There’s no way companies will get rid of their legacy applications, and moving to virtualization is totally stretching IT resources. Organizations are not hiring IT staff. So really, the only hope for managing performance and scale today is automation.”

Naturally, there was a ton of news coming out of the show this week, including a new survey from Precise about virtualization adoption for enterprise applications. Check it out!

Below, we compiled a few of the more interesting headlines coming out of Las Vegas (what happens in Vegas definitely doesn’t stay there):

Congratulations to Zerto, for winning The Best of Show award, sponsored by TechTarget. The company received the award for the Zerto Virtual Replication product.

As you would expect, there were a few announcements from VMWare, summarized nicely by ZDNet. Here’s an excerpt from the article, discussing VMWare’s current strategy, which a company executive described as “a better Windows-based desktop-as-a-service”:

“Available in a few weeks, VMware View 5 promises to simplify IT manageability and control, while providing a high fidelity desktop virtualization experience. Users can expect to realize protocol enhancements that will provide as much as 75 percent bandwidth improvement over LAN and WAN connections; advanced support of 3D graphics; scalable unified communications integration for voice and video media services; and virtual desktop personalization with integrated persona management.”

Technology blog ReadWriteWeb offers this round up of back-up related news (Arkeia and others) and Channel Insider covered a spattering of announcements from HP, Cisco and Trend Micro.

EMC honored three organizations for their business value, innovation and performance with virtualization: Lone Star College, Northern Hospital of Surry County, CSC and Northrop Grumman.

And finally, this Computer Weekly story delivered some useful insight into the challenges of cloud computing for the public sector.

There’ll be plenty more news and trends to come on the heels of this show. We would love to hear about your experiences, if you were there?

An interview with Precise Account Executive Andy Benson

How has the systems management environment changed over the years?

I got started in 1992, by selling for a networking hardware manufacturer. Later I began selling software to manage networks, and servers, aka systems. Systems/servers were distinctly managed separately then. If you had a server you managed that with one piece of software, networking with another, and so on. That started to come together in a more holistic approach around 2000, from managing by department to a service-based approach. Today though, there are still a lot of companies that continue to manage by silos. Organizational charts in enterprise IT have traditionally followed technology silos, and management of the technologies have been similarly separate.

The technology has changed so fast . We have now moved to dynamic, multi-tier architectures, and the need to manage separate areas of IT discreetly has begun to weaken and even become the source of the problem. Some large enterprises are leapfrogging from the well-known, relatively stable world of running key business processes in the mainframe world to cloud computing, virtualization and using SaaS for core applications such as financials and order processing. So even though the shift to this more holistic approach began with service level verification within ASPs (application service providers) only now is it becoming table stakes for enterprise IT management.

What was it like selling software 15 or 20 years ago, compared to today?

The sales method was very much a feature/function sale focused on IT benefits. There was little or no linkage to the business. Today you have to link technology features and benefits to business requirements, and demonstrate better outcomes for users and the business. ROI has to be linked not to IT pain points but to the impact on company operations, customer orders, meeting demand and supporting revenue goals. Connecting all those measures back to the application is not easy, and is sometimes several steps removed, yet it’s what is required to position our product as a solution instead of a tactical tool.

As a salesperson today, I have to help IT create and tell the story to the business owners. Ten years ago, IT had budget, but now headcount and budget has been driven as low as possible. Most IT departments have been stagnant for a while and are afraid to buy anything. So we have to show how we can solve business pains.

Is face time still important when you’re working with customers?

Today, we can leverage technology and the Web to better qualify leads, acquire more prospects, and even do proof of concepts remotely. Unless truly warranted, we try and focus on more quality time and less quantity time when it comes to visits. The goal is to highly qualify a deal before flying people out, because that is so expensive. Face-to-face is still critical but it’s a matter of timing. Tools like WebEx have been a good way for us to get a conversation started. As well, the marketing tools that we use and social media have been very helpful. If I am meeting with a new contact, I will do some research about their background on websites like LinkedIn. It helps me see if I have any commonalities. We have so much more information at our disposal to get ready for a call, and it really doesn’t require too much effort.

Name the most important advancements in technology during your career?

What really allowed speed of change in the new networked world was the move toward open networks and the adoption of IP-based applications. It’s hard to pinpoint a single enabler in this shift, but one that I recall occurred when Compaq embedded an Ethernet adaptor into its chipset. This changed the game by making it cost prohibitive to use other networking technologies, such as token ring, that kept the old guard application infrastructures alive. Fast, cheap Ethernet networks enabled the mass adoption of PCs, while open equipment and network designs laid fertile groundwork for the proliferation of multi-tiered IP applications.

Ethernet networking made it much easier to rewrite client/server applications in IP and leverage Web technologies, which in turn put a lot of pressure on IT to keep up with storage and networking demands and advancements. Of course, then came the Web and the dotcom revolution, which opened up a whole new market category for managing transactions through multi-tiered applications and decentralizing IT in the enterprise.

Now there is the cloud. A simple way of thinking about the cloud is this: it’s just another version of off-site hosting of applications and data. However, that definition completely understates the complexity of cloud computing. The cloud sounds simple but ultimately it’s hard to follow if you could actually look inside and understand the detail and how it operates. To make the cloud work and avoid the pitfalls it presents, enterprise IT managers have to understand where transactions begin and end. Creating service-level agreements is even more important now than in the past, since nearly all critical business applications run on IP networks in multi-tier architectures Throwing hardware at the problem won’t always solve the issue, and it’s too expensive for most companies to do that anyway.

The final trend is the huge impact of power consumption on network architecture and new technologies. Because of the need to conserve energy, there’s a lot more attention to thinking about where to locate data centers and how virtualization and other technologies can help IT be more efficient and save money.

What do you like most about your job?

I really enjoy talking to people about their jobs and their companies. Every organization has a different problem or challenge. That keeps it fresh for me. APM is touching applications that do almost anything today. I recently met with some people in Folsom, where they are managing the power grid in California. That’s just fascinating and I’m always learning something new.

Andy Benson is an Account Executive for the West Coast region of California up to Western Canada. He has been with Precise for one year.