Complete end-user service alignment: IT’s bottom line value to the business

Ed Hallock explains why focusing on the end-user experience is the key to IT service alignment.

“The initial adoption of virtualization technologies is yielding benefits for low-risk workloads, including test and development and non-customer facing processes.”
-Ed Hallock

IT continues spending money to address complexity, yet research shows the end-user visibility gap continues to grow. How does ASG view this challenge?

Ed Hallock. We view this as service alignment, or having a complete understanding of what the end-user is experiencing. The bottom line for the business is that the end-user, whether an internal or external customer, gets an acceptable response time. The end-user doesn't care about infrastructure performance and availability as long as they are able to access applications and complete whatever they need to get done. The challenge for the business is to understand the true end-user experience and to proactively manage the delivery of business services to customers. 

Too many organizations focus on managing technologies and trying to infer the end-user experience based upon performance and availability of multiple technology components. ASG recommends taking a different approach, with the ability to understand different end use response times for different applications, across platforms and increasingly across different geographic locations. 

What needs to happen to ensure your complete set of end-user experiences are continuously being met?

EH. Today's applications span multiple platforms, web technologies, servers, network infrastructures and database technologies. The key is monitoring all of these components and correlating them to understand what is actually happening, before the end-user experience is negatively impacted.

ASG's approach is a solution we call Network and End User Service Alignment, which is an end-to-end, application performance solution that centrally manages and monitors the performance of the entire IT infrastructure to ensure a superior end-user experience. ASG's technology ensures business continuity with complete enterprise-wide visibility and the ability to map the end-user experience to the real-time performance of the underlying infrastructure and components.

In today's economic climate we see accelerated M&A activity and new regulatory requirements that increase the challenge of managing the performance of applications built on different technologies.  How is ASG addressing these issues?

EH. We are increasingly seeing this M&A issue causing companies to have duplicate processes built on different technologies.  Often we see companies with web applications built on both J2EE and .NET frameworks. The challenge is to consolidate and optimize the performance and availability of the applications built on these two architectures. 

To be successful you need to discover the entire structure of web applications, measure actual usage and transaction response, and centrally monitor complex distributed applications across multiple environments. The bottom line is simplifying management of complex technologies to ensure the desired end-user experience.

Many organizations are looking to virtualization technologies and emerging cloud strategies to reduce costs and optimize IT investments. How does ASG see this evolving and its impact on service delivery?

EH. The initial adoption of virtualization technologies is yielding benefits for low risk workloads, including test and development and non-customer facing processes.  However, organizations have been hesitant to extend virtualization into mission critical processes and applications. This hesitation is driven by unknown expectations around managing the performance and availability of applications in virtualized environments.

Again, it gets back to understanding the end-user experience and being able to monitor and correlate IT infrastructure across both physical and virtual environments. What you do not want is to invest in another set of monitoring technologies for virtual environments. What is needed is a good monitoring solution that can guarantee service assurance across both physical and virtual infrastructures.

Do you have any final perspectives or recommendations?

EH. ASG believes that building an integrated business services solution around an organization's end user experience and aligning management products to directly support those objectives is the right approach for any IT organization to truly align with the business. ASG's unique Network and User Service Alignment solution can give any organization real-time assurance to know what the end-user is experiencing as they consume business services.

Biography

Ed Hallock is the Sr. Director of Solutions Management for IT Infrastructure and Operations at ASG where he sets the strategic direction and marketing initiatives for all of ASG's performance management and operations management solutions, including the ASG-TMON family of products.  Prior to ASG, Ed served as Director of Product Management at Mobius Management Systems and for Candle Corporation's OMEGAMONÒ product line.