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Application command centres will improve business performance

Sibahle Malinga
By Sibahle Malinga, ITWeb senior news journalist.
Johannesburg, 21 Apr 2016
Many organisations have lost control over their critical business applications, says Riverbed's Thomas Schuchmann.
Many organisations have lost control over their critical business applications, says Riverbed's Thomas Schuchmann.

Research company IDG found that 70% of companies are suffering from degraded performance of their business applications. Poor performance of end-user tools lies at the centre of the challenges faced by organisations in delivering value to their clients. The sad reality is they don't know about it because their monitoring solutions are not revealing this to them.

This was according to Thomas Schuchmann, Riverbed EMEA SME director, speaking at the Riverbed Force for Business Forum in Johannesburg yesterday. Schuchmann says in 75% of cases where organisations are aware of these technical "glitches" it's only because their end users are telling them they are experiencing problems.

Technology infrastructures are becoming more distributed, redundant, and modular, therefore adding to the complexity of the environment and increasing potential points of failure, he continues.

"There is an urgent need for an application command centre end-to-end visibility and control within organisations.

"IT people are service providers for businesses and for end users, therefore their service quality should be delivered and received on the level of expectation of the end user, observes Schuchmann.

Highlighting the importance of IT organisation in maintaining high standards, he says when the service quality or application quality drops, this has a negative impact on business.

"Jay Haines Landscape Integrations and Operations manager for Shell once said, if 10 000 people are down, due to offline systems, for one hour it has $1 million impact for Shell.

"Last March an Apple iStore had an outage which lasted about five hours and Apple said they lost approximately $11 million during the outage. Even for a wealthy company like Apple, this is a serious business impact which they need to avoid in future," he advises.

He says a number of factors are impacting IT organisations' ability to deliver a superior end-user experience.

Digital era

So many organisations have lost control over their critical business applications because we all live in the age of digital transformation, everything has to be mobile, cloud is the new norm we have apps for everything, he elaborates.

"This all comes with changes in our company policies, cultures and processing structures. If these changes are not done this means we are losing competitive ground, market share, revenue and productivity," he explains.

Conflicting demands

There are a lot of conflicting demands faced by organisations because business is asking for a competitive advantage, while developers want to be fast, agile and transform, notes Schuchmann.

"The operations teams don't want to change their running systems because they prefer stability but of course change is necessary, otherwise the business will lose competitive ground as projects get delayed," he points out.

Complex systems

Due to many organisations facing disruption, systems are becoming more and more complex, Schuchmann explains.

"In an application delivery chain, an end user connects through a network to a Web server which connects to a Web application server, which is connected to services and then to a database.

"This is more complex than the infrastructures and application delivery chains we had 20 years ago, the application landscape has changed a lot since then. What hasn't changed is the organisations approach to monitoring those complex environments," he reveals.

Users are connecting through different devices, hybrid networks, software defined networks to highly virtualized tiers, none of these are within the organisations' control as their data is stored somewhere on a cloud, he goes on to say.

"This complexity is hard to control with an old legacy monitoring method, this means companies are losing revenue as productivity is slow which causes customer frustration," he points out.

As part of the solution, he advises organisations to use high level view BI tools that will allow them to identify problems caused by application codes in order to identify the root causes within a few clicks.

Using this method will help weigh business performance in relation to application performance, he says.

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