Over the last two years, technology vendors have been moving away from using the term "network monitoring" and replacing it with "application performance management." The main reason is that the performance of corporate networks is increasingly measured by the performance of the applications delivered over those networks. As a result, businesses are replacing familiar network-specific metrics, such as network uptime and time to troubleshoot network performance issues, with metrics like application availability and quality of experience as key performance indicators on their networks.

These changes are forcing vendors to enhance their product portfolios and provide more capabilities for monitoring the performance of networked applications in terms of measuring how fast information is delivered to end users via the network, the application itself or the Web services infrastructure, and pointing to possible problems. New opportunities are also being created in the emerging applications performance management (APM) market, including providing it as a managed service, although only a few telecom service providers have focused in on the trend so far.

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- One CFO's Problem is Another CFO's Solution -

One of the top reasons organizations are becoming more interested in public cloud computing services is the flexibility of aligning the cost of IT computing resources with changes in business demand. Back in January, I published an article that discussed how organizations would be very interested in having a somewhat similar model for deploying IT management tools, but not many technology vendors are willing to offer this type of capability for delivering their products.

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