Assuring business without walls

As organisations transition to services-orientation, virtualisation, and cloud computing, it's more important than ever to optimise the performance of distributed services. According to Hannes Lategan, solutions strategist, CA Southern Africa, without an early warning system to alert organisations to impending availability and performance deficiencies in online services, they risk jeopardising customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and revenue.

You want customers queuing to use your services, not queuing to complain. You want them to be rewarded by the service delivery, satisfied with what they receive, and content enough to tell their friends so they use it too.

In a world dominated by online interaction through increasingly complex Web applications, consistent customer satisfaction is the end game. So, how can your organisation sustain an almost optimal online service experience? And provide customers with a fast, always-on Web experience?

The secret is to have complete visibility and a clear insight into how this experience is directly impacted by all of the underlying technologies. Better yet, if you are able to proactively and consistently ensure highly available, end-to-end business services round-the-clock, you will be able to achieve, sustain, and extend your business advantage.

The seminal Web promise of 'business without walls' set the strategic imperative of our times - structuring the organisation and all that it does around the customer. With more and more transactions preceded by 'click here' as opposed to the familiar voice of 'will you be paying cash today?' organisations need to ensure the performance of their revenue-generating Web applications.

Those that do so will protect and increase their revenue; grow share of wallet from existing customers; and expand their customer base through the deployment of next-generation solutions delivered through highly efficient, low-cost, self-service channels.

Without an early warning system alerting the organisation to customer interaction problems, the words “tip”, “iceberg”, and “Titanic” spring to mind. As e-customers interact with highly sophisticated services, they unwittingly reach through powerful and increasingly complex Web applications into the rich layers of IT sediment laid down over the last 35 years (see Picture 2). As a result, it is vital to correlate the real user experience with a deeper visibility into all aspects of that evolved environment. Indeed, it is the only way to seamlessly link effect to root cause in real-time - and prevent or reduce the impact of service delivery problems.

Even as that IT sediment settles, however, organisations are updating their existing revenue-generating environments as they strive for ever greater flexibility and responsiveness. This approach helps ensure continuity; it bridges the gap between established and new services and, at least in part, safeguards the quality of customer interactions and associated revenue streams. The accelerated adoption of service orientation, virtualisation, and cloud services - together with the stretching of the transactional continuum to encompass newer channels - is merely a phase of this evolutionary trend. Heterogeneous infrastructure and hybrid applications will continue to underpin every aspect of service provision and customer interaction. The result? Success in the high-stakes “Webopolis” of tomorrow will depend on the well being of Web applications and their related environments.

In order to deliver on the unprecedented promise of next-generation services, organisations need to develop service assurance methodologies, strategies, and technologies in tandem with the evolving transactional continuum. Paradoxically, the drive for IT flexibility and responsiveness also obscures the organisational view of customer satisfaction. The associated challenges are stark - for example service assurance in the cloud depends heavily upon the ability of a service provider to track Web services into/out of the cloud, and to respond to the actual online experience of each end-user in real-time.

This seemingly innocuous fundamental requirement accentuates the key challenges. These being, first, the growing dependence on Web transactions for revenue; second, the requirement for more services at higher service levels with fewer resources; and the spiralling complexity of the business transaction environment requiring more management and problem resolution investment.

Also, it is imperative that we really understand that along a typical transactional path, the closer the cause of a problem is to the consumer, the more confined the risk; although it is often more obvious. However deep within the transactional path they reside, service availability threats are progressively more debilitating, widespread, difficult to isolate and remedy. They are also expensive to resolve. This simple fact is particularly important as Lean IT (1) thinking propels the virtual/cloud agenda; and B2B-supplier/consumer and LOB/internal/partner interactions take on greater significance in the evolved business model.

As that trend continues, a very interesting pattern emerges across the typical transaction path. A relatively high number of lower-value transactions occur at the consumer end; and a much smaller number of increasingly higher-value interactions occur towards service initiation points. Of course, as the distributed nature of services matures this “value inversion” will continue. This means that the emergent hybrid cloud-based services and next-generation revenue streams, which organisations are incubating, will rely more heavily upon the ability to assure the performance of all facets of the entire transactional continuum. Being able to assure the availability and performance of complex applications and evolved environments will determine the extent of customer satisfaction - and the over-arching future prosperity of the business.

Where will it all end? Unless organisations adopt an early warning system alerting them to customer interaction problems, they risk jeopardising performance, availability - and to the business that means reduced customer satisfaction and loyalty. It really is akin to having a lookout in the crow-nest of the Titanic forewarning of impending disaster - although the iceberg is now growing and the ship is sailing faster and faster. The single biggest challenge facing us as we transition into the world of services-orientation, virtualisation, and cloud computing is to assure the performance of truly distributed services. If, for example, an entire sub-service such as a flight reservation system stops working, an entire business is at risk.

Organisations that innovate will win. By automating the orchestration and co-ordination of infrastructure, applications, and services - with solutions like CA's comprehensive suite of unified enterprise IT management solutions - organisations can proactively address the end-to-end assurance of complete services environments. Enterprise IT management solutions provide business assurance and future-proofing, while extending the value of your IT investments in a future dominated by services-orientation, virtualisation, and cloud computing.

Supporting materials

Press releases:

'Web Stress' identified as Major Cause of Worker Frustration, Stress and Lost Productivity Survey Reveals
http://www.ca.com/gb/press/release.aspx?CID=212077

'Web Stress' Amongst European Consumers Impacts Buying Behaviour Survey Reveals
http://www.ca.com/gb/press/release.aspx?CID=212131

Research

Research survey report: 2009 CA Web Stress Index
http://www.ca.com/Files/SupportingPieces/ca_apm_2009_web_stress_index_212073.pdf

White papers

Achieving Top Performance and User Experience with Next Generation Services and Applications
http://www.ca.com/Files/WhitePapers/cawily-achieving-top-performance-ue-nextgen.pdf

Application Performance Management Tips: Simple Ways to Enhance Your CA Wily Deployment
http://www.ca.com/Files/WhitePapers/ca-wily-apm-deploy-tips-wp-en-us_198467.pdf

CA Application Performance Management Solutions Center
http://apm.solutionscenter.techweb.com/

Product briefs

CA Wily Application Performance Management Product Sheet
http://www.ca.com/Files/ProductBriefs/wily-apm-product-sheet_204133.pdf

CA Wily Customer Experience Manager Product Brief
http://www.ca.com/Files/ProductBriefs/cem_product_brief.pdf

(1) Lean IT is an approach to process improvement that can help you deliver the most value to your customers. Its central concern is the elimination of waste - work that doesn't add value to a product or service.