One of my personal ongoing preoccupations – hopefully related to valid industry preoccupations – is Quality of Experience or QoE. This is at least in part logical. If the Configuration Management Database is the industry’s single most conspicuous hallmark of architectural innovation and multibrand solution integration, QoE is the hallmark of another equally telling factor in evolving the management industry: the growing awareness that technology is meant to serve a flesh-and-blood customer, not vice versa.

While this may sound like a fairly obvious thing to say, and hardly “revolutionary,” the implications of “flesh-and-bloodness” are actually, as social philosophers are fond of saying, “disruptive.” Recognizing that human experience is, in the end, well, human – is actually a catalyst to force IT to redefine how to gauge the value and relevance of its services, and ultimately to rethink how it views its core business mission. As I have written many times, human experience is open ended and dynamic. It follows then in my view that either IT services are, in themselves, a means of expanding and enhancing that experience for work and leisure, or else they are, in themselves, valueless.

EMA has recently completed an extensive report, “Managing Application Performance over the Network,” in which a host of IT preferences and priorities are examined – from the NOC and the data center perspective. The report, sponsored by Cisco, NetQoS, NetScout and Network General, nonetheless touches upon a whole host of technologies and options ranging from systems management to application configuration, to more network-centric disciplines.

For the purposes of this column, I’d like to highlight just two of what turned out to be more than 70 questions addressed to 101 patient phone participants willing to spend 30 minutes on the phone with EMA.

In the first question, we asked for priorities in QoE metrics, and these came back actually in a fairly rational sequence: availability; response time as experienced by the end user; mean time to repair (MTTR); mean time between failure (MTBF); and on request from one of the sponsors, in fifth place, round trip latency across the network.

Of these I would like to say that while, yes, service availability remains key, it is in the area of “response time as experienced by the end user” where much of the industry has focused, parsing this into areas of significant innovation that range from basic single-metric monitoring to actual full blown visual reconstructions of step-by-step transactions. For pervasiveness of observed end-user monitoring, cross-domain correlation, and session-level detail, Coradiant’s TrueSight offers some strong options. Opnet, with Panorama, and Optier, with its capabilities for tracking utilization and actively performing server load balancing, are also vendors to watch in this QoE space.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.