Industry analysts tend to classify vendors into technology "buckets" and create "labels" for each of them, as that makes it easier to compare products, capture key trends and provide context around problems that these products are addressing. This method also resonates with some technology marketers, as it allows them to partially benefit from promotions that other vendors and media are conducting around a label of a technology bucket their product was put into.

The term "application performance management" (APM) has been one of the hottest technology "labels" over the last few years. Performance of enterprise applications impacts nearly all of the key business goals, and it shouldn't come as a surprise that technology solutions for managing performance of these applications has been very high on IT agendas. With that said, it should be even less of a surprise that technology vendors, who are involved in managing the delivery of applications to business users in any way, realized this opportunity and started calling themselves "APM vendors". However, every "hot" industry term has an expiration date attached to it and sometimes it doesn't take long for a company to go from being one of the biggest promoters of an industry term to getting to the point where it doesn't even want to be associated with it.

Back in 2008, there were more than 50 technology vendors that used the term APM to position products that they provide and that number is now down to less than 30. So, had these 20+ companies gone out of business or completely changed their product portfolios? No, but they had realized that the term APM got diluted and that it is in their best interest to separate themselves from technologies that address the same problem as they do, only from a different perspective.

Emergence of new categories

Being thrown into the same technology bucket with companies that are addressing a similar problem from a different perspective could be a major challenge for many technology companies. Organizations that are in this position typically have two options: 1) wait until the market matures to the point when it becomes obvious that their solution is significantly different than other products in the same "bucket", or 2) coin a new term to describe a category in which their product belongs, promote the heck out of it and hope that it will become an industry accepted term. It took a combination of these two approaches to somewhat change the boundaries of the APM "bucket". That resulted in more market awareness about the differences between two groups of products that are also addressing challenges of managing application performance, but doing it from different perspectives: end-user experience monitoring and business transaction management (BTM).

The increased interest of end-user organizations in having visibility into how their applications are performing, not only from the perspective of their IT departments but from the perspective of business users, resulted in more market awareness about the role that end-user experience monitoring solutions are playing in managing application performance. The market matured enough to become more aware of the fact that different flavors of technologies for monitoring the quality of end-user experience, such as those provided by Aternity, Knoa Software, Coradiant or AlertSite, do not compete against, but complement vendors such as OPNET, OpTier or Quest's Foglight.

On the other side, vendors that specialize in managing application performance from a business transaction perspective also found a way to raise awareness about the differences between their solutions and many other APM products. This resulted in an increased adoption of the term BTM when describing capabilities of these solutions. These solutions are taking a different approach when addressing issues with application performance, as compared to some other APM vendors, and enable organizations to monitor the performance of applications across an entire transaction flow. Some of the vendors that fall in this group include OpTier, Nastel, INETCO, Correlsense, Precise Software, dynaTrace and AmberPoint (acquired by Oracle).

Preliminary findings of TRAC’s end-user survey show that organizations are still struggling to gain full visibility into their IT services and infrastructure. Many of the organizations surveyed are reporting that, even though they made significant investments in new IT monitoring and management tools and increased the amount of performance data that they have on hand, they are still not seeing any significant improvements in key performance indicators (KPI). More than half of these organizations are reporting that the performance data they are collecting is not actionable and many of them find it difficult to prevent performance issues before end-users are impacted.

Organizations have been asking for more visibility into IT performance and many vendors responded by providing more monitoring points, better network taps, new modules for seeing deeper into parts of the infrastructure or expanding monitoring into new areas. These product enhancements did help organizations see deeper and wider, but didn’t necessarily help them have more visibility. Now that organizations have all of this data on hand, the challenge becomes: how to make the most sense of it and turn this data into actionable information?

Some vendors realized this opportunity and designed management solutions for correlating, normalizing and providing the right context for the data that organizations have access to.

One of the examples of this type of vendor includes ASG Software. The company’s Enterprise Automation Management Suite (EAMS) sits on top of multiple tools for monitoring IT infrastructure and services and enables companies to put this data into the right context so they can identify and resolve performance issues. Also, VKernel is a virtualization management vendor that leverages data collected mostly from VMware management tools and applies a set of algorithms that allow organizations to conduct a “what-if analysis” for capacity planning, optimization and inventory management in virtualized environments. Another example of a vendor who is capitalizing on this opportunity is Netuitive. The company’s self-learning technology provides dynamic performance thresholds and performance data correlation capabilities that allow organizations to leverage data from other monitoring tools and constantly adjust to changes in IT environments, while reducing management overhead. Also, Monolith Software is providing a platform for correlating and normalizing information about different aspects of IT management, such as asset, fault or performance management.