E-Performance Management Gains Attention at CMG

Software Magazine, Feb, 2000 by Janet Butler

IF YOU'RE AN EBAY, A SCHWAB, or a lesser light, and your CEO is reading about your performance or Capacity problems on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, who are you going to call to troubleshoot? Will it be a long-time, dependable performance management firm that's dealt with subsecond response time, capacity management, load balancing, and service-level management for nearly 25 years? Or will organizations choose a Web performance newcomer? While the experienced performance management experts seem a natural for c-commerce management, there are no obvious, easy solutions in the new-age Web/Internet environment.

This was evident at the recent Computer Measurement Group's (CMG) 25th annual conference. As history has taught, management is always an afterthought-be it systems management, distributed management, enterprise-wide management, or, now, c-commerce/c-business management. So skilled analysts and vendors alike must scurry to catch up.

While the c-management concepts are similar to those in more traditional environments, the differences are perhaps more telling. For example, performance analysts have achieved subsecond response time for many mainframe applications. However, they must now deal with the eight-second rule: If Web users have to wait longer than eight seconds for pages to download, common wisdom says they will click away.

Outside In

A new class of vendor is targeting Web performance concerns, according to Caryn Gillooly, an analyst at Hurwitz Group, Framingham, Mass. Such companies focus on e-business management from the outside in, starting from the user's Web experience and circling back into the systems. Examples include San Francisco-based net. Genesis, which monitors the customer's Web site experience; and Watchfire (a division of Tetranet Software Inc., Ottawa, Ontario), which rates site quality.

No newbie to the software business, SAS Institute, Cary, N.C., a long-time performance management vendor, most closely represented this Web-site management perspective at the CMG conference. Similar to net.Genesis, its SAS Solution for e-intelligence provides intelligent information from Web-based transactions and data, allowing businesses to better understand their customers' needs, and target the right customers.

Addressing the e-environment from a more traditional systems management viewpoint was George Dodson, director of IT Management Consulting, Candle Corp., El Segundo, Calif. With e-business spreading like wildfire, he stressed such IT infrastructure management requirements as availability, performance, capacity, service levels, problem and change management, security, and disaster recovery.

Inside Out

In keeping with these concerns, the more traditional systems management firms are coming from the inside out, according to Hurwitz's Gillooly, focusing on back-end management. Indeed, the back-end systems must be performing well for successful e-business, since requests from the Internet often hit the back-end systems hard.

Theoretically, says Gillooly, companies striving for a complete e-business require both e-management perspectives: from the outside in, and the inside out. While organizations have often quickly put up Web sites to establish a Web presence, they're not really ready to compete. They must manage the sites from both business and infrastructure standpoints.

The e-management product introductions of the traditional performance management vendors represented at CMG were sporadic, and very recent. Candle Corp., for one, is targeting e-business management with its CandleNet family of e-business lifecycle solutions. The products aim at accelerated development and deployment time for e-business market entry; e-business operational scalability and change management; and customer satisfaction, approached by monitoring the end-user experience.

PerformanceWorks WebWatcher from Landmark Systems Corp., Reston, Va., is the first component in its PeformanceWorks for e-Business suite. While WebWatcher measures real e-business transactions, PerformanceWorks is planned as a comprehensive suite of software tools for monitoring and managing the entire e-business enterprise.

VisualPulse, from Datametrics Systems, Fairfax, Va., is an e-business and Web server monitoring and reporting tool aimed at Web hosting companies, application service providers, and ISPs. VisualPulse monitors specific Web sites, servers, and network nodes anywhere over the Internet, visually providing real-time and historical reports on network latency and packet loss.

Right now in this new e-business management market, customers must use a variety of products to meet their needs. According to Gillooly, some of the larger systems management vendors, such as BMC, Houston, are moving into e-business management. Others, such as Hewlett-Packard, Palo Alto, Calif., and Computer Associates, Islandia, NY., to an extent, are well poised to do so if they do it right.

Whether traditional performance analysts and capacity planners will meet the challenge and translate their skills into the e-environment, or if newer Internet firms will capture the marker, remains to be seen. CMG keynote speaker Leilani Allen, a partner with Summer Point Consulting, Mundelein, Ill., warned CMG attendees that the e-environment is not self-managing, and challenged capacity managers to get their knowledge out there.