Apdex Alliance debuts at Interop

The Apdex Alliance introduced itself to the world at last week's Interop 2005 trade show, while members spotlighted the group's upcoming specification in their products.

The Apdex Alliance, which now has 15 members, launched earlier this year with a formula designed to give enterprise IT managers a simplified way to measure application performance. According to founder Peter Sevcik, president of NetForecast, the group's application performance index could provide the more than 100 vendors hawking performance wares a standard method to measure end-user satisfaction.

"There are so many metrics collected on performance that it gets to be information overload," Sevcik says. "The index would be a number that clarifies what all the data means to highest-priority applications without replacing any of the underlying data."

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The Apdex Alliance introduced itself to the world at last week's Interop 2005 trade show, while members spotlighted the group's upcoming specification in their products.

The Apdex Alliance, which now has 15 members, launched earlier this year with a formula designed to give enterprise IT managers a simplified way to measure application performance. According to founder Peter Sevcik, president of NetForecast, the group's application performance index could provide the more than 100 vendors hawking performance wares a standard method to measure end-user satisfaction.

"There are so many metrics collected on performance that it gets to be information overload," Sevcik says. "The index would be a number that clarifies what all the data means to highest-priority applications without replacing any of the underlying data."

Last week at Interop, Sevcik chaired the show's performance track, and several vendors showcased products that will be able to take advantage of the index in future releases.

Expand Networks announced a new version of its ExpandView management software, which lets network managers administer, configure and collect data from distributed acceleration appliances. Version 3 includes a mapping feature that provides a topology of all Expand Accelerator appliances at remote and branch offices. ExpandView is installed on a dedicated Windows server, and the appliances send application traffic statistics to the software, which can now provide trend reports on historical data. Available now, ExpandView 3 costs between $5,000 and $45,000.

Liad Ofek, vice president of technical services at Expand, sat on a panel that discussed the Apdex Alliance and its goals. He says the Apdex index would help decipher the NetFlow, probe and third-party performance data the company's appliances collect and provide a single measure through its ExpandView console.

"The index will provide a performance measurement based on response time across several collection points," he says.

Fellow alliance members Coradiant, Swan Labs and Symphoniq also separately used Interop to talk up their efforts around the index, expected to become a full-blown specification sometime this summer.

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