Application Performance Management Services for the Little Guy

Pushing the application performance management service envelope for the SMB crowd, TMC Communications recently launched a new application performance monitoring and bandwidth management service. Sporting the grandiose name ‘Titan', the new service is designed to meet the needs of small-to-medium sized businesses with little or no in-house network or application performance monitoring expertise. We predict that Titan is the harbinger for a new crop of offerings to help smallish organizations squeeze the best application performance from their network infrastructure.  

Interestingly this innovation comes from a reseller not a carrier who could also offer it. Why? A reseller like TMC Communications is hungry to make its price-conscious customers stick with it, especially during tough economic times--and providing information about and offering control over application performance is a smart way to cement the relationship and keep customers in the fold.

TMC resells circuits from multiple carriers and offers least cost routing. Titan offers a big benefit in this environment by showing a consolidated view of application performance across carriers. Without this capability, TMC is limited to carrier-specific tools that give only limited visibility and no control over application performance.  It also benefits TMC because it gives their sales representatives information about what applications are running over the network and how well they are performing. That sets the stage for a more consultative customer relationship.

Based on Streamcore's StreamSense platform, Titan is available in three packages: Quick-View Reporting; Real-Time Access Reporting; and Application Performance Control and Application Visibility Reporting.

• Titan Quick-View Reporting: Provides weekly PDF reports for long-term monitoring and metrics on the performance of applications, sites, and network links. There is no additional charge for this service.
• Titan Real-Time Access Reporting: Provides real-time application performance monitoring, alarms, application troubleshooting functions, and historical application performance data accessible via a web portal. TMC does not charge extra for this service.
• Titan Application Performance Control and Visibility Reporting: This service includes all the features of the Real-Time Access Reporting service plus the ability to prioritize business-critical applications, allocate bandwidth, and accelerate through compression. This service is an "upsell". TMC charges an installation fee, a 25 percent premium over its base service fee, and another 25 percent premium on top of that for ongoing professional services that explain to customers the meaning of real-time reporting information and help customers tweak policies to improve performance.

TMC tells us that so far almost all of their customers have chosen the last of the three packages--the control plus reporting service--because it helps them make the most of the their existing bandwidth.

We asked TMC about plans for application performance SLAs. They told us they are considering offering application performance SLAs, but it is hard for them to do so because they don't have control of underlying telecom infrastructure. They do, however, expect to offer VoIP MOS score information. 

• APM
• Application Performance Management
• Streamcore
• StreamSense
• Tital Quick-View Reporting
• Titan
• Titan Application Performance Control and Visibility Reporting
• Titan Real-Time Access Reporting
• TMC Communications