Last time, we discussed how application delivery was more complex than just optimizing the performance of the network and the applications that run on it. We quoted a CIO who pointed out the importance of application delivery as well as some of the organizational impediments. He said: “Managing application performance is the thing that I am getting the most flack on. We have to begin to work outside of the silos and get away from the application and networking organizations pointing fingers at each other.” Today, we’ll draw from the survey we discussed in the last newsletter to look closely at organizational impediments to successful application delivery.

Given the increasing importance of managing application performance, we asked the 215 survey respondents to indicate whether or not their company has a formalized set of processes for identifying and resolving application degradation. We were pleased to see that about 36% indicated that they already had these processes and another 31% indicated that they were in the process of creating them.

One IT professional we interviewed is the manager of network services and operations for a manufacturing company. He stated that as part of the company’s processes for managing application performance the IT organization offers application service-level agreements (SLA). He added that these SLAs focus primarily on the availability of the application and not on its performance. They do not have a performance SLA for their ERP system.

Another IT pro we interviewed is the global infrastructure engineering manager for a company in the automotive industry. He said that his IT organization does not currently have formalized processes for managing application performance, but that they are working on it. He explained that they were motivated to develop these processes because application performance has become more of an issue recently in large part because the IT organization is increasingly hosting applications in a single data center, and users from around the world access those applications. As a result, the parameters of the WAN that impact application performance (i.e., delay, jitter, packet loss) are more pronounced than they would be if there was less distance between the user and the application.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.