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Like most enterprise IT organizations, your web applications services environment is growing at an increasingly rapid rate. It’s clear that no traditional software application is immune to web-based competition, and the deployment of more and more web-based applications is an established fact.
At the same time, the complexity of your web application services environment continues to increase. To meet demand, you are using new technologies, like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and virtualization. SOA separates design from technical implementation and server virtualization gives you additional flexibility to increase physical resources for services. While these technologies can add significant value they also add significant management complexity. Increasing numbers of web-based business transactions travel over diverse and interconnected infrastructures; through networks, application servers, firewalls and virtualized systems; via heterogeneous operating systems and distributed Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). As the demand increases, new technologies and new iterations of existing technologies need to be integrated into your environment, making your infrastructure increasingly vulnerable to failure and difficult to manage in production.
Many organizations attempt to accomplish these goals with highly scalable, distributed composite applications and evolving architectures like SOA. These flexible technology building blocks enable organizations to rapidly deploy new applications, rapidly establishing links between customers, employees, suppliers, and the enterprise’s vital business data. Leading global organizations are successfully leveraging these technologies to provide essential business services via the web. Web applications now perform a number of important business functions: revenue generation, supply chain management, and the delivery of essential services to name just a few. But achieving business goals through the development and deployment of web applications also has had unintended consequences.
Web-based transactions are processed entirely automatically and, as a result, business stakeholders in the organization are no longer the front line between customers and the enterprise. Customers—online shoppers, service users, trading partners—are now being serviced directly by IT. This is an unfamiliar role for IT, which has not traditionally been responsible for ensuring customer satisfaction, let alone measuring and reporting on customer experiences in terms that are familiar to business owners.
As the first line to the customer experience, IT must provide the business with visibility into the total, end-to-end customer transaction. Additionally, they must bear the responsibility for managing web application performance on a day-to-day basis. This means monitoring applications 24x7 in production, detecting and eliminating performance issues throughout an ever more complex application infrastructure, and measuring compliance with internal and external service-level objectives that have been negotiated with business owners and third-party service providers.
To join with IT in ensuring customer success, line of business managers need real-time visibility into customer experiences, the success of business processes, and the business impact of failed customer transactions. Only then will they have the critical data they need to prioritize incident response according to business criteria, to effectively manage customer service level objectives, to improve customer satisfaction, and, in turn, to assure revenue streams.
Achieving these objectives requires a management solution that focuses on the customer and business process and is specifically designed for ensuring transition success—one that provides real-time insight into end-user experiences and deep end-to-end transaction visibility across the entire web application architecture for both business and IT stakeholders.
Yesterday’s Management Tools Are Not Enough
Organizations deploying complex, next-generation web applications have discovered that the tools, skills, and processes they have used to manage applications for years suddenly seem completely ineffective for managing business-critical processes.
Next-generation applications are inherently complex and difficult to manage. They are comprised of many interconnected, heterogeneous parts—Web servers, Java and .NET applications, application servers, packaged applications such as Siebel, Oracle and SAP as well as back-end systems such as IBM MQ, CICS, Tuxedo, and various kinds of databases. Compounding this complexity are initiatives around Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as business process and integration technologies, and quality initiatives like ITIL and Six Sigma.
This degree of complexity is the new norm, and yesterday’s tools cannot provide the transaction visibility or management power to optimize these new environments. When organizations deploy composite applications, they are inevitably confronted by a variety of new management challenges.
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