Pricey application performance problems

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

Any network manager worth his or her mettle knows that when application performance degrades he or she is going to hear about it -- especially if a majority of companies report performance problems cost them more than $1 million per year.

That's why network managers have been working hard to get a handle on application performance on the LAN as well as the WAN. But despite the efforts -- and countless pitches from vendors hailing the ideal technology -- a majority of companies experience application performance degradations.

At least, that is according to a recent survey of 100 senior IT decision makers at U.K. enterprise companies conducted by independent research company Vanson Bourne and commissioned by network optimization vendor Ipanema Technologies. And the majority of those polled said additional bandwidth does little to improve performance.

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Any network manager worth his or her mettle knows that when application performance degrades he or she is going to hear about it -- especially if a majority of companies report performance problems cost them more than $1 million per year.

That's why network managers have been working hard to get a handle on application performance on the LAN as well as the WAN. But despite the efforts -- and countless pitches from vendors hailing the ideal technology -- a majority of companies experience application performance degradations.

At least, that is according to a recent survey of 100 senior IT decision makers at U.K. enterprise companies conducted by independent research company Vanson Bourne and commissioned by network optimization vendor Ipanema Technologies. And the majority of those polled said additional bandwidth does little to improve performance.

Of the 100 organizations of 1,000 or more employees polled, one in 10 reported that poor application performance can cost them about $4 million or more annually. The financial services sector, in particular, saw 40% of respondents reporting annual losses of $2 million or more from application performance problems.

The major performance issues reported included "slow running applications, downtime, packet loss and jitter." And 44% of those polled said such performance problems typically stemmed from network problems -- yet 75% of all surveyed said bandwidth upgrades rarely solved the application performance issues they were experiencing. Still 57% of those surveyed said they still resort to adding bandwidth to address application performance problems.

Because of the inconsistency of application performance only 58% of survey respondents said they are able to offer their end users "application-centric" service-level agreements, an Ipanema press release stated. Part of the problem is that IT managers are unable to manage network and application traffic in real time, the survey found, in particular for 81% of those polled in retail, distribution and transport industries.

With companies considering a move to SOA and virtualization, more factors must come into play when looking at application performance. Companies such as Akorri look at application dependency on storage and other resources to ensure peak performance, and industry watchers argue application intelligence will be incorporated into network equipment to deal with performance going forward.

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.