Application life cycle, business services management

For many companies today, business applications represent a significant investment and are critical to their success. In today's economy, companies need to be agile and quick to deliver new or enhanced applications. At the same time, customers and business users demand - and correctly so - that the applications must available when required and perform with the speed that is expected.

The reality is that applications do not always produce the desired business outcomes, nor do they always meet performance and availability expectations, despite good intentions, detailed plans and best practices that have been followed.

Another reality for a lot of these companies is that there is a disconnect between what their end-users and customers are experiencing and what the IT department is monitoring and reporting on, or in worse cases, IT is not doing any monitoring of availability and performance. A study by an industry analyst showed that over 80% of IT projects experience performance problems when first put into production.

So what can IT departments do to be more aligned with business and improve their applications performance and availability? At SORTIT, we propose two things. Adopt a life cycle approach to application management, and implement business services management (BSM) as the solution to manage your IT environment.

For application life cycle management, it means companies should have processes and solutions that start the management of applications in development and pre-production, and not just once they are in production. It also means the integration of testing and monitoring solutions.

This could be achieved using HP software solutions. HP software solutions provide a process-driven approach to the complete application life cycle. HP solutions combine functional testing, load testing, synthetic and real-user monitoring and diagnostics products to create a tightly integrated solution for effectively managing applications and business services.

SORTIT, a Gold HP Software partner, combines the provision of the relevant HP software products together with implementation services and best practice consulting to provide companies with a total solution.

SORTIT, a Gold HP software partner, has been focusing on providing application management and BSM software solutions and professional services for many years. SORTIT was started in 2005. The company has quickly built a reputation as a company that provides quality and fair value in everything it delivers. Its focus is on providing market leading IT solutions and consultancy to help customers optimise their IT so they can achieve more business value from IT investments.