The market for Web performance solutions has experienced significant changes in 2010 and many of the trends that have been driving new dynamics in this market are expected to be even more accelerated in 2011.

Traditionally, these types of solutions have been predominantly deployed by large Web properties (media, entertainment, social networks, etc.) and organizations that are either using their websites to generate revenues or rely on Web portals to share information internally. However, changes in the way that business users are accessing corporate data are causing Web applications to became more than just revenue generating, branding or collaboration tools. In 2010 we have seen applications that are being accessed through Web browsers and delivered over public Internet become more critical beyond business-to-customer (B2C) environments, as organizations are increasingly using these applications to communicate with their employees and partners.

End-user organizations who participated in TRAC’s recent survey reported that they anticipate 11% of overall network traffic that is currently being delivered over corporate private networks to be delivered over public Internet in the next 12 months. Deployments of SaaS applications, more organizations considering and deploying Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) models and looking to achieve cost savings by leveraging advantages of public Internet are increasing the importance of managing Web performance. As organizations are becoming more dependent on the performance of Web applications they are also realizing that some of the same trends that are driving increases in the importance of these applications are also posing new performance management challenges.

New challenges of managing Web performance are forcing both technology vendors and end-user organizations to respond, which in turn is driving new dynamics in this market. Based on TRAC’s recent research, we identified ten areas that are significantly impacting how different flavors on Web performance management solutions are being deployed and managed, as well as some of the capabilities that are becoming more important in this market.

Today, Keynote Systems and dynaTrace announced a strategic partnership that would allow end-users to leverage these two solutions in an integrated fashion. This is the second strategic partnership that Keynote has created in this space over the last two months, as they formed a similar type of relationship with OPNET Technologies that was announced on July 22. These partnerships might be confusing to some, as it might seem that these three companies are essentially doing the same thing: to monitor the performance of business-critical applications. However, while Keynote is specializing in monitoring the quality of end-user experience and performance testing for Web applications from the outside of the corporate firewall, OPNET and dynaTrace provide solutions for monitoring application performance across enterprise infrastructure inside of the firewall.

The general perception of solutions for end-user experience monitoring, such as the one that Keynote is providing, is that they are very effective in identifying when business users are experiencing problems with application performance, but they are not as effective in drilling down into parts of the application delivery chain to isolate and resolve the root cause of the problem. On the other hand, tools for monitoring the performance of internal infrastructure, such as OPNET or dynaTrace, are able to monitor the transaction flow of applications across the network and into the data center, and provide a deeper dive into how applications are performing, what is causing performance problems and how they can be prevented and resolved. TRAC’s recent report “10 Things to Consider When Evaluating End-User Monitoring Solutions” revealed that the ability to integrate tools for monitoring the quality of end-user experience with tools for monitoring enterprise infrastructure is one of the key aspects of having full visibility into application performance. With that said, there is a clear value that end-user organizations can experience when products that include robust capabilities for application performance management (such as OPNET and dynaTrace) get integrated with one of the leading solutions for end-user experience monitoring from outside of the firewall (Keynote).

However, in order to evaluate a true significance of these partnerships, they should be analyzed in the context of some of the key dynamics in this market.

Over the last 2-3 years, the term “Application Performance Management” (APM) became an integral part of marketing messaging for more than 70 technology vendors. Even though solutions provided by all of these vendors are helping to improve the speed and availability of business-critical applications, these vendors are providing solutions that are significantly different. These solutions could range anywhere from network performance monitoring to application acceleration, Web management and even managed/carrier services.

However, the APM as a general concept has become relatively easy for decision makers of end-user organizations to digest, as it hits all key pain points that IT organizations are dealing with. As a result, multiple vendors were more than happy to jump on this bandwagon and position themselves as players in this space.

Other than the language in their press releases and marketing collateral, these vendors really have nothing else in common. Technology wise, how similar are the offerings of F5, NetQoS, Keynote Systems and OpTier? They are not similar at all.