Survey results released Tuesday by end-user experience monitoring vendor Aternity reveal that a majority of 70 senior IT and line-of-business professionals polled want to get a more "proactive handle" on IT problems before end users experience productivity or performance degradations.
More than 35% ranked this goal as their number one priority for 2008, and more than 70% of survey respondents said that anywhere between 10% and 75% of all IT problems in their organizations are revealed by end-user complaints and not IT. Most IT managers would consider that the worst way to learn of performance problems, but the survey results show the problem persists.
In terms of other priorities for 2008, more than 20% of those surveyed considered server virtualization and security a priority. Rounding out the top five priorities were maximizing SOA strategies for optimal reuse for 23% of polled IT and line-of-business mangers. Green and energy-efficient technologies ranked among the top five priorities for nearly 20% of survey respondents.
Aternity pointed out in a press statement releasing the survey results that industry analyst reports (Gartner) predict that between 2005 and 2011, IT spending on performance tools will rise more than 45%, bring the total market to $3.5 billion. Aternity likely sees this as an opportunity for its Frontline Performance Intelligence and Real End User Experience Management product suite.
"50% of the survey respondents reported that the combination of the three key performance indicators -- desktop performance, application performance and user productivity -- wre all equally important in order to optimally determine real end-user experience," the press statement read.
Dubie is a senior editor at Network World.
The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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Results not surprising
The results of this Aternity survey definitely agree with what Integrien is seeing in terms of significantly increased demand for our products and services. Whereas 18 months ago, proactive performance management was of interest to only the earliest technology adopters, the early majority are definitely coming forward to explore these solutions.
It is important to note that while end-user experience monitoring is an important part of a proactive solution, the more critical element is an analytics engine. To get to a proactive posture, you need an analytics engine to understand the normal behavior of your environment as it varies throughout the days, weeks and months, accounting for seasonal events. Armed with this understanding of normal, real time analytics solutions automatically determine the behavioral relationships between business performance, user experience and IT infrastructure metrics so that when abnormalities occur, future abnormalities can be predicted (and thus prevented). While a user experience monitor can determine that a transaction slowdown is happening in the database, a real time analytics solution can show that the database slowdown is actually due to abnormal behavior in the app server tier that is the result of duplicate transactions being submitted to the database. That is the power provided when you integrate and analyze data from all silos including user experience. This is the level of proactive problem solving that is required in today's complex IT environment.
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