* Why is the app performing so badly for end users?
Could you be a candidate for application acceleration technology? The products available today could help IT managers deal with a spectrum of performance problems.
Forrester Research Senior Analyst Robert Whiteley in June released a report that covers the spectrum of end-user drivers the research firm identified in talking with enterprise companies. In the report “Application Delivery Optimization with Your Network,” Whitely details the most common complaints and why companies turn to application delivery and WAN optimization technologies.
To start, enterprise IT managers will hear often how specific application performance, such as SAP delivery, suffers and end users can’t deal with the loss of productivity due to the slow application. Because productivity suffers, CIOs are reacting to the need to serve up applications from central locations to multiple, distributed locations.
“Firms might invest $2 million in an enterprise-wide ERP deployment, only to get thwarted by 18-second application response times – rendering it virtually unusable,” Whiteley says in the report.
Second, companies that rely on employees collaborating need to ensure that both WAN and LAN users get somewhat similar performance with applications. Network latency between various locations can make WAN users endure slower application times. Sending files, real-time trading and documents shared among locations all can suffer from poor application performance over the WAN, the report states.
Another common pain point among enterprise companies is distributing content globally, Forrester discovered.
“Although [content distribution networks] are ideal for solving customer performance for a Web site, they’re often too expensive for firms now struggling with a new generation of content woes – trying to dish out more dynamic content including video, voice and Web objects like Flash to ensure end user and employee experiences,” the report reads.
Lastly, Whiteley says, Web-based applications such as corporate portals, intranets and e-commerce applications are flourishing at enterprise companies, but often they cannot scale to end-user demands. Web services will only make this situation worse, Whiteley says, as companies work to integrate internal and external Web services and to adopt a service-oriented architecture (SOA) model.
“Firms struggle to provide the necessary throughput and performance to scale to the thousands of transactions per second required by today’s users,” Whiteley writes. “These applications are often revenue-generating and drive companies’ top-line growth.”
