When WAN optimization technologies were first introduced to the market, solution providers were looking to differentiate from each other mostly based on how fast they could move the data across the WAN and how much they could save for end-users in cost of bandwidth. However, as the complexity of network traffic increased, technology vendors had to provide more than just pure acceleration, data reduction, or basic bandwidth management capabilities. As a result, the ability to fully manage performance of applications delivered over the WAN is now becoming the key point of differentiation among vendors.

This Solution Overview report from TRAC Research examines technology capabilities and strategies of Ipanema Technologies and their alignment with key trends in the WAN optimization market.

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One of the emerging trends in IT performance management is that the proliferation of SaaS and cloud computing technologies are changing how organizations go about using and managing IT services. These trends are adding a new dimension to service level and performance monitoring and organizations are increasingly expecting a similar level of flexibility from their management tools as they are getting from their SaaS and cloud deployments. This also opens up new opportunities for management vendors to differentiate themselves from the competition and increase their presence in new markets by acquiring technologies that are well positioned to address new management challenges.

Our recent article highlighted two technology companies that are likely acquisition targets based on their technology, alignment with key market trends and the ability of their solutions to fill in technology and go-to-market gaps that larger vendors currently have. In part two of this series, we are covering two additional companies that meet the same criteria.

Again, this listing is not based on any inside information.

TRAC Research recently recorded a podcast about the key trends in the load testing market with Priya Kothari, Product Marketing Manager for HP’s Performance Validation solutions. Some of the topics covered in this podcast include: using load testing solutions to align IT with business goals, internal processes that organizations need to have in place to get the most out of their load testing solutions and the role that load testing technology plays in deploying cloud computing services.

Here are some of the key insights from the podcast:

“Finding the tools to actually do your testing is the easy part, but implementing proper load testing practices is often the hard part… In order to do a performance test you’ll need to know what the application is built for. Meaning, what is the business purpose of the applications, what will users be doing on the applications, what types of transactions will be performed and how many users will be accessing that application? You also need to know what users will be expecting from the application and what types of service level objectives should be in place and tested for. It is also important to understand what pieces of the applications are the most critical. If they have this type of information, testers can then accurately plan the testing to ensure that high priority requirements are always covered… This really helps to put an end to testing for testing sake, but rather align IT testing teams with the needs of various business stakeholders.”

“A lot of people believe that moving to the cloud actually means that you don’t have to worry about performance testing, since now they have access to unlimited hardware. What they often don’t realize is, that if the application itself is not scalable, then the elasticity of the cloud can actually cost them thousands of dollars. If the application is not scalable you will be using new machines to support the load. When moving to the cloud, it becomes even more important to test your applications and to tune them properly so they are optimized when it comes to hardware consumption… With the hybrid cloud, there is a new factor that organizations need to consider: you need to ensure that you have enough bandwidth between yourself and the cloud provider. Also, cloud vendors themselves need to start thinking about load testing. They need to test their infrastructure for specific usage conditions and ensure that they are not going to be a bottleneck.”

“Application modernization is one of the key trends that we are seeing. We are seeing more customers that are moving away from legacy technologies and move to rich internet applications, Web 2.0 and SOA-based applications, as well as frameworks such as AJAX, Flex and Silverlight. We are also seeing that some of the major application providers themselves are picking on these trends. For example, SAP is starting to use Flash, Flex and Silverlight in their latest releases. We are also seeing a browser explosion. It used to be all Internet Explorer. Now we are seeing more of Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera. Everyone is looking to create a richer end-user experience from using their applications to become more competitive in the marketplace.”

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End-user monitoring solutions are becoming an integral part of competencies that organizations need to have in place when managing the performance of business-critical applications. However, there are some significant differences between technologies that fall under the “end-user monitoring” umbrella. More importantly, the effectiveness of these solutions depends on the environments in which they are used, the goals of end-user organizations deploying them, and the performance metrics that they are able to collect.

This report highlights ten key items that end-users should be aware of when evaluating end-user monitoring solutions.

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TRAC Research recently had the chance to discuss some of the key trends in the cloud management market with Dave Asprey, Entrepreneur in Residence at Trinity Ventures. Dave is one of the leading experts in cloud management, application delivery and performance management and in the past has held executive positions at Citrix, Blue Coat, Zeus Technologies and Speedera Networks. Some of the key topics covered during this podcast include: market opportunities for deploying usage-based pricing for IT management solutions, key challenges for managing cloud performance and the impact that the emergence of cloud computing is having on load balancing and WAN optimization solutions.

Here are some of the key insights from the podcast:

"If you are a public IT management company and you switch to usage-based pricing, you'll probably have a hard couple of quarters. So for public companies this is a hard pill to swallow, but for private companies the challenge is that this is a very disruptive technology. You either have to make this business model from the start or have to make pretty radical changes to your existing model."

"I am not a big believer in cloud bursting, at least not with the way the technology is today. What is going to happen is that enterprises may have some applications that might be cheaper to just toss on the cloud. Same companies are going to say: "These applications are going to be in the cloud for the next couple of months". Well, 2 years later that becomes a significant application to the company. And that's how all other disruptive technologies like networking, PCs and mobile devices entered the enterprise."

"If you really architected something to run on hardware, it is pretty hard to port it to the cloud or to port it to a virtual appliance. And if you do that, the odds of it being highly performing go down substantially. However, if you start with software architecture and keep in mind that it can run on pretty much any hardware, this becomes something that is relatively easy to do."

"As you move more strategic applications to the cloud, application performance management pieces will become critically important, especially for paid applications. Another application management technology that will become critically important in the cloud is something that I would call "n+1 scaling". Hardware vendors have historically put 2 devices next to each other, and they would just have the "heartbeat" between the two. However, a few vendors out there architected solutions where they can just keep adding more boxes. When you are selling virtual appliances to cloud providers, it is very important that providers can deploy any number of virtual appliances and have them all running as a part of a single pool or as a subset of many different pools. Most virtual appliances today are not up to that "n+1" pooling task."

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On March 10th, 2010 CA announced that it had agreed to acquire Nimsoft, an IT service management company, for approximately $350 million. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of March of 2010, and Nimsoft will operate as a separate business unit. The goal of this report is to examine the impact of this acquisition on the IT service delivery market and the impact it could have on customers and prospects of CA and Nimsoft.

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2010 could be a very eventful year in the IT performance management market. It is already becoming apparent that virtualization technologies are moving from lab environments to production, and end-user organization are gaining a better understanding of what cloud computing really means for them and how it should be managed. Also, performance monitoring concepts such as “aligning IT with business”, “end-to-end management of application performance” and “making performance data more actionable” are no longer marketing terms. End-users are now able to translate each of these terms into a set of specific technology capabilities, those that are really needed to achieve their IT management goals. These trends are putting additional pressure on leading IT management vendors to expand their product portfolios and differentiate from the competition.

Even though the majority of large IT management vendors have similar visions of where this market is headed, it is becoming apparent to most of them that they cannot execute these visions by solely depending on their marketing, sales and product development muscles. Their competitors are already getting ahead by acquiring vendors that are leaders in their markets (i.e. Compuware acquiring Gomez, CA acquiring NetQoS, etc.) and many of them will have to act quickly before someone else grabs those few leaders or truly innovative solutions in the various IT performance management sub-markets that are left.

This three-part article series will cover our predictions about the 10 technology companies that are likely to be acquired in 2010. In the first part, we’ll start with two technology vendors, both of which are providing different flavors of application acceleration and traffic management.

One of the key questions in IT performance management is: Does an improved ability to collect more performance data generally lead to an improved performance of IT services? The answer is: No, not necessarily. Actually, a number of end-user organizations that I have spoken with reported that their ability to prevent and resolve performance issues deteriorated after they invested in additional monitoring tools. As new challenges of managing application performance “jump out”, organizations tend to deploy new point solutions that are addressing each of these problems. This does allow them to collect more information about these specific problems, but it doesn’t necessarily allow them to have  better control of the overall IT performance.

Managing application performance is one of the key IT initiatives for end-users, but there is not a single class of technology or solution provider that can address every single issue of managing the performance of business-critical applications. Some major IT management vendors are investing significant resources in acquiring companies to enhance their product offering and enable them to tackle more performance challenges. However, the capabilities needed for end-to-end management of IT performance are rapidly changing and companies that are looking to provide capabilities for addressing each of the major IT management challenges are likely to keep playing “catch-up”. End-user requirements are changing at a pace that is faster than product development cycles or times needed for acquisitions to be initiated, agreed on and completed. So, are organizations that are looking to access all relevant IT performance data through a single platform are out of luck?

TRAC Research had the chance to interview Darin Bartik, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Quest Software about the key trends and challenges regarding managing application performance in virtual environments.

Here are some of the key insights that Darin shared during this podcast:

“The reason that most of IT organizations are not on the same page is that their priorities have been based on the old way of thinking about performance monitoring and management. This is based on the IT being pushed by the business and then struggling to keep up, so they end up being reactive many times and that reactivity has forced the need to get very broad coverage. What ended up happening here is that this broad coverage didn’t help domain specific technologists, so a lot more domain specific tools were purchased…. and all of this different data and different tools that people have has created all of this finger pointing and you have “war room” activities and never ending conference calls.“

“The fundamental challenge for managing application performance in virtual environments comes from a really good part of virtualization, which is both resource sharing and all of the efficiencies that come with it, but this breaks that physical link that was true forever, and all traditional management tools are now starting to lose visibility because these tools were built on the idea of the physical world…End-user organizations have to take the view of a service that they are delivering, which is something that is static. So if we take more of a service management approach and manage the application instead of the infrastructure pieces that will help maintain that visibility link all the way from where the end-user interacts to the virtual infrastructure.“

“Automation is something that customers are begging to ask about, especially in more mature environments and that’s what is really going to take things from more of a performance monitoring to a performance management paradigm. Instead of just monitoring what is going on and reacting to that manually, let the tool take an administrative action. Let it witness the event and instead of telling someone that something is wrong and giving some expert advice, actually take that expert advice and perform an action.”

“Virtualization was set to change everything and when it comes to managing performance it really does."

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Once in a while, IT management vendors pick up a theme that their customers are very interested in; they start building their marketing messaging around it, write white papers about it, and have it all over their websites. Before you know it, what originally was a legitimate request from end-user organizations for addressing challenges that they have, it becomes a marketing term that is very difficult to define for end-users. “Aligning IT with business” is becoming a very good example of that.

The fact is, the majority of end-user organizations are still struggling to come up with a set of metrics that would help them understand how their IT initiatives are contributing to their business goals. These organizations are allocating a significant part of their enterprise budgets to their IT initiatives and they need to figure out:

• How their past investments in IT are contributing to their bottom line
• What criteria they should be using when evaluating the value of new technology investments
• How to prioritize their current IT management initiatives

So the need to align IT is a true pain point for end-user organizations and they are willing to invest in technology that will help them with that. But what technology is the best fit?