Assaf is OpTier’s Director of Solution Architecture. He joined in 2003 to run the Presales team and later led several successful implementations of OpTier’s transaction management solutions for large enterprise organizations in North America.
Newcomers to OpTier often ask who within the organization uses our software and what main benefits they get out of it. Interestingly enough, there isn’t a short answer to this question because, as we have learned, our transaction-focused solutions can cater to many needs and address gaps that reach far beyond the use cases we had in mind when designing and building them.
Here are some of the things OpTier’s customers have taught us about the ways they benefit from our solutions. Read More »
Assaf is OpTier’s Director of Solution Architecture. He joined in 2003 to run the Presales team and later led several successful implementations of OpTier’s transaction management solutions for large enterprise organizations in North America.Categorized: Application Performance Management, Big Data Analytics, Marketing & Strategy
Download our White Paper on Using APM to Solve Business Problems
The secret behind the most useful IT systems is that they are not strictly, purely focused in the IT department. In an age of tight budgets and difficult requirements, adding business value to a company and moving it forward in the market are the primary motives for new technology adoption. Application performance management can help shoulder that burden for companies. We have created a white paper on the topic called Using APM to Solve Business Problems that you can download.
Time to evolve
Of course, APM is at its best when in an advanced form, specifically meant to cope with modern business needs and current IT setups. Organizations keep evolving and discovering new use cases for the technology. In fact, firms can now work on business problems well outside of the usual performance and availability issues APM was created to resolve.
This excitement about doing more with APM, coupled with the ever-evolving nature of tech environments, has brought about the need for enhanced APM tools. So far, changes to the system have involved a more nuanced look at SLAs and auto-discovery of business flows and issues at the coding level. Analytics and complex event processing have turned the flow of data from these systems into more comprehensible and resonant insight for users. The development is constant and ongoing, and older APM tools quickly become obsolete in the face of new challenges. Read More »
Assaf is OpTier’s Director of Solution Architecture. He joined in 2003 to run the Presales team and later led several successful implementations of OpTier’s transaction management solutions for large enterprise organizations in North America.Categorized: Application Performance Management
The best things in life are free, but BTM solutions are not among them. After all, managing complex business transactions requires many talented people to dedicate many months of their valuable time to making it happen. So how much should it cost? What is the “sweet spot” that balances the investment in bringing a BTM solution to market with the value that the users are getting out of it?
As a vendor of BTM solutions, we know what our costs are, so that part of the equation is fairly simple to figure out. Trying to put a dollar amount on the value of BTM is where things get trickier.
The common way of quantifying the value is breaking it down into value points that derive from the different ways customers use BTM. For example, practically every user who deployed a BTM solution in Production has been using it, among other things, to prevent application outages. If we can determine the monetary cost of an outage – and we can – and if we can show that BTM has reduced outages by a certain percentage (or eliminated them entirely), we will be able to calculate how much money was saved by deploying BTM for outage avoidance.
And outage avoidance is just one of the many use-case scenarios for BTM. Virtually everyone who implemented BTM has also discovered how useful it can be for problem isolation and resolution. Just like with outages, it is possible to measure or estimate the cost of the problem determination and resolution cycle. If it can then be demonstrated that the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) for performance issues dropped by 70% since a BTM solution was implemented, we can add this windfall as another component in the total value of BTM.
We can come up with more use-case scenarios for BTM and estimate how much money was saved in each one of them. BTM can cut costs by improving processes such as application optimization, QA testing, SLA management, capacity planning, activity-based costing, application consolidation, and more. Each one of these cost savings can contribute nicely to the bottom line value of BTM in an organization, but does this total really represent the value of BTM for the organization?
I hereby propose that it does not.
If we examine all the different scenarios in which BTM is used, we can see one common element and that is that BTM provides a new level of visibility that did not exist beforehand. BTM allows IT to see things that they could not see before.
Consider this analogy: Nine year-old Jack is a vision-impaired kid who, for the first time in his life, gets a pair of glasses that allows him to see clearly. How much are the glasses worth to him? We could point out that with his new glasses on, Jack successfully avoided an incoming car as he was crossing the street and saved himself from being badly injured or worse. Also, Jack now spends only 30 minutes a day doing homework whereas before it used to take him well over two hours. Furthermore, Jack’s family can finally move out of their expensive house, which has special amenities for the vision impaired, and into a regular house. This will cut down their rent by almost 20%.
Each one of these observations can be translated into a dollar amount, but is this getting us any closer to determining the true value of glasses for nine year-old Jack? What about the fact that for the first time, Jack can see what his parents and sister look like? His amazement when he found out that his cat actually has one blue eye and one green eye? His pride at finally being able to read books and watch TV just like the other kids? Isn’t Jack getting far more value out of these simple discoveries and accomplishments than from having to spend less time doing homework?
BTM is a game-changing technology. Being able to see transactions clearly enables IT to stop “flying blind” and start making informed decisions that take service management to the next level. Just like Jack with his new glasses, once IT starts using BTM regularly, they can no longer manage without it even for one day. What, then, is the real value of BTM for an organization? The question will remain open for now, but I can tell you that much – it goes far, far beyond just being able to avoid outages and fix problems faster.
Assaf is OpTier’s Director of Solution Architecture. He joined in 2003 to run the Presales team and later led several successful implementations of OpTier’s transaction management solutions for large enterprise organizations in North America.Categorized: Uncategorized
I still remember my initial reaction when I saw a GPS device for the first time: How is it possible? Does it really do what it says on the box? I was awed by the potential but also suspicious in its ability to work for me. Living in Israel at the time, I had pretty good reasons to be a skeptic. Most new technologies are unable to work internationally on day one. In the case of GPS, the core technology would work practically anywhere on the planet, but without some key features like an accurate mapping database for Israel and Hebrew support, there wasn’t much I could do with it in my specific environment.
When people in IT learn about Business Transaction Management for the first time, their reaction is often a similar mix of awe and disbelief. They are awed, because gaining true visibility into the behavior and flow of all business transactions has been an industry holy grail for quite some time now, and they also express disbelief, well, for the exact same reason. How is it possible to auto-discover and track all business transactions, when transactions are not tangible, manageable configuration elements like servers and routers? At best, such technology might work in a simple, straightforward environment, but our IT environment is huge, complex, distributed, heterogeneous… can this BTM work for us?
Like other emerging technologies, BTM is climbing up a maturity curve. From just being able to show round-trip response times and infer some latency breakdown of network versus data center time, superior BTM solutions are now capable of tracking transactions deep into the data center, providing rich, granular topology views that cross hundreds of web, application, authentication, messaging, and database servers. The ability to show simple request-response sequences has expanded to cover complex, asynchronous flows using pub/sub and “send and forget” messaging protocols. In addition to showing all transactions, some BTM solutions will now auto-discover and show entire business processes, aggregating many discrete transactions into a “short list” of real business flows. The ability to measure service quality is also maturing from application and server uptime SLAs (remember five nines?) to transaction-specific response time SLAs and Apdex ratings that represent end-user satisfaction in real-time.
Despite being one of the privileged few who witnessed BTM grow from a mere idea into a full-blown enterprise solution, I still find myself sometimes awed by this technology. It is, after all, an ambitious attempt to visualize complex, abstract business ideas, and manage them like any other assets of the organization. How is it possible? Does it really work? As my friend and colleague Andy previously noted, the “aha moment” for BTM typically doesn’t arrive until after the customer has already seen it live in their own environment. And that’s when the fun begins.
Assaf is OpTier’s Director of Solution Architecture. He joined in 2003 to run the Presales team and later led several successful implementations of OpTier’s transaction management solutions for large enterprise organizations in North America.Categorized: Uncategorized
Stay connected with OpTier for the most relevant articles in the industry!
