While the term “application lifecycle management” is not new, it’s usually associated with large vendors that have a portfolio of separate products sold to separate IT constituencies. And while it would be, in all fairness, a stretch to claim that a little company called Shunra Software is providing application lifecycle management with only two products, Shunra has tackled a very significant problem from a lifecycle perspective: distributed application performance over WANs.

Moreover, Shunra has brought a simplicity of deployment to this challenge that in some organizations is causing, say, network operations teams to actually create “road shows” proselytizing the advantages of Shunra’s products to application developers, testers and quality assurance groups. Of course, they’re not doing this out of a sense of civic duty; they’re doing it because they’re tired of paying a price for failed expectations in service levels and expensive adjustments to bandwidth-hungry applications that really never were designed to work on their networks in the first place.

Shunra’s product suite includes Virtual Enterprise, aimed at operations pre-deployment with some support for post-deployment, QA and testing; and Virtual Network Desktop Edition, aimed at application developers. The suite enables what Shunra calls “the WAN on your LAN” and takes a unique approach to packet analytics to capture real parameters reflecting jitter, latency and bandwidth throttling where packets can be delayed, dropped, fragmented, duplicated and congested. It does this between targeted end-user desktops in remote, distributed locations and targeted application servers. Shunra’s approach is to replicate this dynamic to enable evaluation under various scenarios, such as best-case or worst-case parameters in a WAN-emulation appliance. It can also provide ongoing monitoring of WAN behavior to see how applications will continue to perform, to verify if fixes are actually effective, and to gain insight when network changes may affect current application designs.

This is an agentless approach in which decisions can be made to, for instance, modify the WAN to accommodate application performance, to “right-size” the wide area if it is over-provisioned, to perform “what-if” scenarios to more proactively evaluate application performance, or to seek opportunities for cost savings. Needless to say, these values - particularly the “what-if” capabilities - can provide clear benefits for QA and testing.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.