* Exploring a key piece of IT functionality – visibility
Jim moderated 11 sessions at the May 2009 Interop conference in Las Vegas. Most of the panelists were vendors who advocated the importance and capabilities of a wide range of technologies and services. Jim was intrigued to realize that there was a theme that ran through most of his panels. That theme was that there was a big gap between the capabilities that the panelists said were possible and the experience of the session attendees. We will use the next few newsletters to explore that gap relative to a key piece of IT functionality – visibility.
The first session that Jim moderated at Interop was on the topic of application performance management. All three of the panelists emphasized the importance of visibility. Each one stated their belief that you cannot manage application performance if you don’t have visibility into the traffic that transits the WAN. It is difficult to argue with that line of thought. However, at the end of the presentations, Jim asked the audience how many of them had an application performance management tool of any sort. Almost all of the hands went up. Jim then asked how many of them had a tool from one of three companies represented on the panel. The majority of the hands went up. Jim then asked the session attendees how many of them had the type of visibility that the panelists had discussed, and almost no hands went up. The point is not that there aren’t products in the market that provide granular visibility. There are. Unfortunately, in many cases IT organizations have not been able to justify the investment in tools and processes that it takes to get this visibility.
During the rest of Jim’s sessions, the need for visibility was highlighted by a wide variety of vendors, including the suppliers of firewalls, routers, LAN switches and WAN optimization controllers. We don’t think that it is a coincidence that such a large number of speakers who came from significantly different components of the IT industry were all talking about the need for visibility. It was also not the case that there was any one new phenomenon, such as the emergence of cloud computing, that was driving the discussion. As will be discussed in subsequent newsletters, we believe that it is a confluence of several factors that is driving the need for visibility. We will also discuss in subsequent newsletters what IT organizations are doing to gain the visibility they need.
In the mean time we want to hear from you. Do you have the type of visibility into your network that you need to do your job? If so, how do you get that visibility?
