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).

End-user organizations are looking to take more of a service-centric approach when managing IT performance, and management vendors, for the most part, have done a good job of adjusting to this trend. Recently, I had the chance to see a number of demos of IT performance monitoring products that are based on different underlining technologies for collecting performance data, are being sold to different job roles within the organization, and even competing in different markets, but they all had something in common. The first screen of their performance dashboards looks almost identical. And products that are based on network monitoring technologies, data center management or application monitoring all of a sudden have the same look and feel:

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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?