Application Performance – Much of the costs associated with implementing a new app or upgrading an existing app are operational. For most companies at least a quarter of their entire IT budget is aligned to integration and configuration management.
monitoring SLA’s – That may sound like an easy and obvious request, but it can be incredibly complex to get a useful answer.
Firstly, you need to be able to describe your SLA (service level agreement) analytically, and then secondly you need to be able to trace each transaction from beginning to end to be able to identify any attributes that didn’t meet the definition within the SLA.
Julius Caesar is quoted as saying “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered), if Caesar had been a businessman in 2020, I think he may have said Collectas indicium Lunaris examinetur et sententiis (I collected data, I analyzed, I decided), and he may have added I used Nastel XRay to do it.
COVID-19 – Cost companies have a list of priorities that are set each year, and budgets and resources are aligned to these. For most companies the priority list looks something like this:
- New business initiatives (opening new offices/factories, product launches)
- Expansion of existing business initiatives (hiring more staff)
- Governance, risk & compliance (regulatory compliance, reporting & intelligent security)
- Improvements to performance and user experience (cloud migration, optimization)
COVID-19 has slowed down 1&2 for most businesses, and while there is pressure on budgets, all of a sudden 3&4 have moved to the top of the list. While GRC improvements are always “planned “, often having a plan is enough to meet the requirements, so in many cases this is the “can that is kicked down the road”.
There is a fundamental issue in the SaaS market; If a SaaS company makes more money from services that from their software, then they are not motivated to make their software better, because it would actually reduce their revenue.
Cloud – Business applications have continued to become more complex, and the tools we all rely on to monitor performance have not always kept up.
The basic model that APM relies on, starts by capturing performance metrics and then using the knowledge developers and administrators have about the how these metrics can be analyzed to describe the performance of specific business processes.
Recently, I wrote about the difference between long-term support and continuous delivery releases of IBM MQ. In that discussion I pointed out that based on their traditional cadence that a new MQ release was not far off.
Are you like many enterprises, using a mix of messaging middleware applications including IBM MQ, Kafka and/or Tibco EMS?
And
Are you in the process of either moving some apps off of mainframes and in-house datacenters to the cloud, or starting to build news apps in new cloud environments?
After reading Richard’s blog about large balloons in India, I felt the need to explore this topic a little further.
A few years back I was on a business trip to Bangalore, and one night while in my hotel room reading the paper copy of the Bangalore times (a free paper left in my hotel room by the staff) , I came upon a really interesting article about luxury train journeys across Africa.
On my first trip to India I stayed right across from the gateway of India. This is a tourist area, especially popular for the locals, and some international travelers. From my hotel window, I could see street vendors with these really big balloons.