Marketing Associates takes advantage of Compuware APM tools

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

Mark Petroff, CEO at Marketing Associates, a technology-enabled marketing services firm, envisions a day when the reception area at the company’s Detroit headquarters features a 60-inch monitor cycling through all of its customers’ application performance dashboards.

“Application performance management is something that differentiates us, and my goal is to show every application we monitor,” he says.

Application performance management: Keeping an eye on the end-user prize 

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Mark Petroff, CEO at Marketing Associates, a technology-enabled marketing services firm, envisions a day when the reception area at the company’s Detroit headquarters features a 60-inch monitor cycling through all of its customers’ application performance dashboards.

“Application performance management is something that differentiates us, and my goal is to show every application we monitor,” he says.

Application performance management: Keeping an eye on the end-user prize 

Whether visitors ever find such a sight is yet to be determined, but Petroff says he at least would like to have the company’s top 10 customers – those with the most time-sensitive applications – running on APM dashboards by the end of 2011.

To meet that vision, Marketing Associates this year implemented Compuware’s Vantage tool for end-to-end APM and Gomez, an on-demand platform for managing Web application performance across the Internet. The Compuware duo replaces a collection of open-source tools, including Nagios and PerfMon, says Andrew Frey, CTO at Marketing Associates.

“We had everything tied together and it worked OK, but it really just provided availability and resource monitoring, not application performance monitoring – and that’s the best kind of monitoring you can have,” he says.

The addition of Gomez to Compuware’s APM portfolio gave the company the advantage over other vendors evaluated, Frey says.

“When a client like DuPont has users in Asia, for example, only Gomez can help us tie APM together in one transactional view, where we can do a breakdown and show where a transaction took two seconds at the end user, two seconds on the database, one second on the Web server, one second here and so forth,” he explains.

Frey’s goal is to migrate all of the legacy monitored applications to Vantage by year’s end, he says.

While improving its ability to troubleshoot problems more quickly than it could previously, the APM tools provide Marketing Associates two other primary benefits, Petroff says. “It gives us the opportunity to price services with a value-added component for additional visibility and capability and, internal to Marketing Associates, it gives my account management teams confidence in the IT organization – it’s not a black box anymore.”

How do you intend to improve your management capabilities in the new year? Share your visions with me here.

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can e-mail her or find her here.

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.