Managing Business-Critical Applications: A Guide to Finding the Right Software

B u y e r s ' g u i d e
Finding the right software
for managing your
distributed business-critical
applicationsTable of Contents
> 1.0 Introduction: Optimizing Business-Critical Applications 1
> 2.0 What Makes a Successful Solution? 2
> 3.0 Asset Management 5
3.1 Automatic Discovery 6
3.2 Consumer Discovery 7
3.3 Dependency Tracking 8
3.4 Always On 8
3.5 Enables Communications Across Teams 9
3.6 Policy Management 11
3.7 Performance and Scalability 12
3.8 Support for Multiple Protocols and Applications 14
3.9 Support for Business Process Tracking 15
Copyright © 2008. Progress Software Corporation. All rights reserved.1.0 Introduction: Optimizing Business-critical applications
Organizations constantly strive to maximize revenue and minimize costs. From an IT perspective, the way to contribute to these business objectives is to optimize your distributed business-critical applications. These are the applications that are vital to increasing revenue or productivity, and minimizing costs, yet often the underlying systems lack transparency. Today, these applications are increasingly service- or SOA-based and distributed - i.e., composed of services that can be quickly reused in other applications to achieve agility in aligning the IT with new business opportunities and goals. Because of the vital role the underlying services and business processes play and their ability to be reused to great advantage, they should be considered corporate assets and managed as such.
Unfortunately, managing these assets is easier said than done. Business-critical applications and the services that comprise them typically span systems, databases, and middleware from multiple vendors and are built using a variety of technologies. These service assets are also often distributed, residing in different organizations, under different ownership - and, importantly, not always under the control of the application owner. Finally, these systems often demand high performance and scalability to meet the increasingly high demands of around-the-clock, global business. As a result, they are hard to manage. For example:
> How can you get complete visibility into every step of an application, and how can you track, in production, the quality of service for different customers in this diverse infrastructure - and still have a low total cost of ownership (TCO)?> How can you detect issues proactively before they occur? And when they do occur, how can you perform root cause analysis quickly before end users experience the issue or business is interrupted?> How can you efficiently establish and enforce policies that align your IT infrastructure assets with your business goals, again while achieving a low TCO?
This buyer's guide explains the core asset management capabilities required to address these challenges in production and optimize critical application performance and availability. It should be used as a point of reference for assessing and evaluating vendors and developing a comprehensive request for proposal (RFP) for selecting the appropriate tools and infrastructure to successfully build a component-based infrastructure for delivering mission-critical applications.
First, however, let's look at the characteristics that lead to easy adoption and successful use of a solution.
Copyright © 2008. Progress Software Corporation. All rights reserved. 12.0 What makes a successful solution?
Keeping in mind the focus on the mission-critical nature of the distributed application, solutions will have success criteria that go beyond feature/functionality. These criteria, often thought of as application architecture, should be obvious, but often get "lost in the shuffle." We strongly recommend evaluating value against these high-level success criteria, in addition to key feature requirements in order to ensure the ability to grow and expand the solution over time. In fact, key features are perhaps less important because, with the right architecture, features are easy to add. However, the wrong product architecture is often difficult to compensate for and presents problems when addressing enterprise-scale mission criticality.
In fact, it seems that the biggest gap in current offerings is in the inability to run solutions to this "space" in a production envi... [download for more]