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.

In October of 2009, when we launched TRAC Research, we based our approach for covering IT performance management technologies on two advises that we were given by end-users:

• Don’t evaluate products by throwing them into technology buckets, but talk about what these products can do in specific usage scenarios

• Distinguish impactful from “cool” technologies, meaning discover what are the measurable business benefits from deploying a technology solution, not how “hot” the technology is

We thought that the best approach for doing this would be to launch an end-user survey and ask folks that are using this technology what their experiences are. This is when things started to get really messy. Before we even formulated the questions, we conducted close to 150 interviews with end-users, executives of technology vendors, prominent writers and some true thought leaders in this space to make sure that the questions are spot on to what they care about. Just to clarify, none of us are rookies in this space and for me, this is the 18^th survey of this type that I’ve created. Although, this time, launching the survey was more “interesting” than usual.

One of the emerging trends in IT performance management is that the proliferation of SaaS and cloud computing technologies are changing how organizations go about using and managing IT services. These trends are adding a new dimension to service level and performance monitoring and organizations are increasingly expecting a similar level of flexibility from their management tools as they are getting from their SaaS and cloud deployments. This also opens up new opportunities for management vendors to differentiate themselves from the competition and increase their presence in new markets by acquiring technologies that are well positioned to address new management challenges.

Our recent article highlighted two technology companies that are likely acquisition targets based on their technology, alignment with key market trends and the ability of their solutions to fill in technology and go-to-market gaps that larger vendors currently have. In part two of this series, we are covering two additional companies that meet the same criteria.

Again, this listing is not based on any inside information.

One of the key questions in IT performance management is: Does an improved ability to collect more performance data generally lead to an improved performance of IT services? The answer is: No, not necessarily. Actually, a number of end-user organizations that I have spoken with reported that their ability to prevent and resolve performance issues deteriorated after they invested in additional monitoring tools. As new challenges of managing application performance “jump out”, organizations tend to deploy new point solutions that are addressing each of these problems. This does allow them to collect more information about these specific problems, but it doesn’t necessarily allow them to have  better control of the overall IT performance.

Managing application performance is one of the key IT initiatives for end-users, but there is not a single class of technology or solution provider that can address every single issue of managing the performance of business-critical applications. Some major IT management vendors are investing significant resources in acquiring companies to enhance their product offering and enable them to tackle more performance challenges. However, the capabilities needed for end-to-end management of IT performance are rapidly changing and companies that are looking to provide capabilities for addressing each of the major IT management challenges are likely to keep playing “catch-up”. End-user requirements are changing at a pace that is faster than product development cycles or times needed for acquisitions to be initiated, agreed on and completed. So, are organizations that are looking to access all relevant IT performance data through a single platform are out of luck?

Once in a while, IT management vendors pick up a theme that their customers are very interested in; they start building their marketing messaging around it, write white papers about it, and have it all over their websites. Before you know it, what originally was a legitimate request from end-user organizations for addressing challenges that they have, it becomes a marketing term that is very difficult to define for end-users. “Aligning IT with business” is becoming a very good example of that.

The fact is, the majority of end-user organizations are still struggling to come up with a set of metrics that would help them understand how their IT initiatives are contributing to their business goals. These organizations are allocating a significant part of their enterprise budgets to their IT initiatives and they need to figure out:

• How their past investments in IT are contributing to their bottom line
• What criteria they should be using when evaluating the value of new technology investments
• How to prioritize their current IT management initiatives

So the need to align IT is a true pain point for end-user organizations and they are willing to invest in technology that will help them with that. But what technology is the best fit?

Some of the key reasons for the proliferation of cloud services and virtualization technologies in the enterprise are measurable business benefits, such as improved flexibility of managing computing resources, decreases in operating cost and total cost of ownership (TCO). Many management vendors recognized this opportunity and enhanced their product portfolios with capabilities for managing the performance of virtualization and cloud technologies. However, only a few of these vendors are actually offering management products that are based on virtualization technology or using SaaS as a delivery method. So this brings up the following question: If organizations can achieve significant business benefits from virtualization and the Cloud when managing their computing resources, can they achieve similar benefits from using these technologies for managing the performance of IT and business services?

The changes in the economic climate that happened in late 2008 and 2009 forced organizations to take a hard look into their IT spend and find areas where they can cut cost and still be able to support the needs of end-users. Some of the main areas that many of them identified where:

• They were paying for management capabilities that they were not using
• They had computing resources that were underutilized
• Their operational cost for managing IT performance was too high