End user service management grows in importance

The CIO-level business angle on the latest tech

In my May 2007 article Use Client Service Intelligence to Get Proactive, I wrote about a relatively new category of IT management tool that measures the performance of end user computing assets (i.e, desktops and notebooks) from the end user’s perspective. Tools in this category help you understand how people use their computers (“working patterns”), and how well the computers perform their required tasks. Knowing this kind of information can help reduce your support costs, help you plan and execute migration cycles, and ultimately help increase end user productivity.

Now Forrester Research has just issued a report by senior analyst Jean-Pierre Garbani entitled The Forrester Wave: Passive Agent End User Experience Monitoring, Q3 2007. This report helps IT and operations professionals understand the market and make an informed decision on selecting an end user service management (EUSM) tool.

Forrester’s report identifies “end user experience” products from four independent software vendors that all fall into the “leader” category. The companies and their products are:

* Knoa Software -- Knoa Experience And Performance Manager
* PremiTech -- Performance Guard 5.0
* Serden Technologies -- Interact ES
* Symphoniq -- TrueView

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In my May 2007 article Use Client Service Intelligence to Get Proactive, I wrote about a relatively new category of IT management tool that measures the performance of end user computing assets (i.e, desktops and notebooks) from the end user’s perspective. Tools in this category help you understand how people use their computers (“working patterns”), and how well the computers perform their required tasks. Knowing this kind of information can help reduce your support costs, help you plan and execute migration cycles, and ultimately help increase end user productivity.

Now Forrester Research has just issued a report by senior analyst Jean-Pierre Garbani entitled The Forrester Wave: Passive Agent End User Experience Monitoring, Q3 2007. This report helps IT and operations professionals understand the market and make an informed decision on selecting an end user service management (EUSM) tool.

Forrester’s report identifies “end user experience” products from four independent software vendors that all fall into the “leader” category. The companies and their products are:

* Knoa Software -- Knoa Experience And Performance Manager
* PremiTech -- Performance Guard 5.0
* Serden Technologies -- Interact ES
* Symphoniq -- TrueView

According to Forrester, all four products behave in a similar fashion, and differ mostly in the reporting capabilities. All four products deploy a passive agent on the desktop to gather PC and application performance data and then send that data to a central database for collation and reporting. The reports tell you how the client computers in your organization are responding to their users’ needs.

When I talked with Garbani in May, he expected that the market for EUSM tools would really take off in the next few years. His reasoning is that IT applications have become very complex, with lots of moving parts. There’s now so much interaction among PC-based, server-based and Web-based applications that it’s hard to tell where the root of a problem is when a performance problem arises. An EUSM tool can help you see what is transpiring throughout a transaction, so you can pinpoint the problem.

Of course, the word “problem” is subject to definition. For instance, suppose an end user is using a desktop application and he attempts to perform a specific task. Say that task is saving his file. When he clicks on “Save file,” it takes his computer 15 seconds to perform the save, and his PC is hung-up until the save is complete. But the task does finish and the file gets saved.

Is this a problem? The Help Desk might not think so because the intended action did take place. The end user thinks it’s a problem because the action takes too long and stifles his productivity. He might not save his file as frequently as he should to avoid the downtime of waiting for the action to complete.

What’s causing the save function to take so long? A desktop management tool probably can’t tell you this; an end user service management tool can.

Desktop management products like LANDesk Management Suite and Altiris Client Management Suite are often complementary to EUSM products. Together, they tell you how your IT assets are performing from a technical perspective (desktop management) as well as from an end user perspective (EUSM). If you’d like to learn more about the differences between desktop management and end user service management as well as how they work together, I encourage you to read Essential Solutions’ white paper on this topic, End User Service Management: The Key to Optimizing the End User Computing Experience.

In another development in end user service management, Lenovo has incorporated these functions into its ThinkVantage set of technologies. Lenovo recently announced an alliance with Serden Technologies and the availability of InterAct ES for ThinkVantage Technologies. Given that Lenovo ThinkVantage technologies are strategic differentiators for Lenovo, this speaks volumes about the importance of end user service management.

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

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.