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Handling a complex environment
Leaving aside, for a moment, the reality of merger-related complexity or legacy-related untidiness, even seemingly straight forward environments present different types of transactions.
After all, in the modern IT environment, even with greater use of standards-based systems, complexity reigns. CICS and IMS transactions can come from a mainframe; transactions can also come from various channels, most notably the web; or servers and databases; as well as SOA components, or EAI connections, or Complex Application, Web, J2EE, Mainframe, or Network Service Provider areas.
Think of BTM as a new way to assert patterns, despite all those linkages. Hewlett Packard, with its OpenView Business Process Insight, began earlier in the decade to help businesses refine service level performance.
Another early provider in field, New York-based OpTier, Inc., initially concentrating heavily on data center monitoring tools, then moving into BTM with CoreFirst. Deutsche Bank, a particularly high profile customer-willing to be named rather than simply described, is using CoreFirst to manage various mission-critical apps, including its settlement system.
Oakland, Calif.-based Amberpoint, which now supports Microsoft BizTalk server 2009, and has customers that include Citigroup, Cigna, and Carlson Wagonlit Travel Group, focuses on management of SOA implementations, monitoring the components and service-layer of performance.
Coradiant, San Diego, announced on July 8 the acquisition of Palo Alto-based Symphoniq, will enhance Coradiant's web management suite. The vendor has customers that include Fiserv, Thomson, and PNC Bank as well as GE Healthcare.
Correlsense, an Israli-based firm with U.S. headquarters in New York, which Gartner named this year as "a cool vendor," offers SharePath. In a white paper on the subject, Correlsense's CEO Oren Elias pointed out that BTM systems should:
- monitor all components across all platforms that a transaction touches.
- map all the hops of a transaction, beginning at the end-user, in a complete transaction topology.
- rapidly implement the solution without invasive instrumentation.
- do it without impacting the performance of monitored systems.
- manage large amounts of data very fast and efficiently.
- analyze data and present it in actionable, intuitive dashboards and reports.
A common language
Moreover, businesses can benefit from IT performance measurement that describes activity at the application level and can help to create a lingua franca for IT pros and non-tech personnel, notes Jim Frey, research director, Enterprise Management Associates, Portsmouth, N.H.
"In most companies, the communication gap between IT and business is the elephant in the room," says Frey. "Any tool set that can help improve the conversation by generating performance terms [definitions] that both groups can relate to will add value." BTM can help in areas that include capacity and continuity planning and availability management as well as compliance management and configuration maintenance.
Not that Frey sees business transaction management as a breakout tool category that's strictly new. "I see it as more of an evolution of IT monitoring tools from HP and IBM and others," he observes. "Instead of focusing on the speed or reliability of infrastructure components, BTM measures performance at the application level, showing all the transactions that flow through various components."
In most industries, applications that are called mission critical get the moniker because they can't go down, certainly not for any length of time. "Certainly, in the cases of telecommunications, trading environments, and various web businesses, you need to quickly address problems," says Frey. "Anything that will support more rapid diagnostics by connecting each system implicated would add value."
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