Feature Articles

November 19, 2012

We have been talking about this problem for years - the gap between IT and Business. All the experts have advised that bridging this gap should be a high priority for any company. The following is catalog of suggestions from across the APM industry on how to bring IT and Business closer together ...

November 16, 2012
Martin Grobisen

Every organization today is looking to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. In addition, organizations are trying to be more responsive to their internal customer demands. Maybe your ITIL-based Service Desk solution can help ...

November 12, 2012
Matt Stevens

Separate application and network monitoring approaches simply won’t cut it anymore. To be truly successful, your organization must bring these two solutions together ...

November 09, 2012
Jill Billhorn

Today’s small businesses are getting a competitive lift thanks to mobile devices, according to a new report by technology solutions provider CDW. The biggest challenge of mobility is managing the multitude of devices that employees use for work ...

November 06, 2012
Ashley Owen

Continuous delivery, continuous deployment and continuous integration — what do these all mean and are they the same thing, or even related? There is a lot of confusion around continuous delivery, but what isn't a mystery is that this topic and manner of releasing applications into production is a hot button issue in the industry right now ...

October 25, 2012

This is an epic list of mistakes. These are the top reasons why APM deployments fail, according to many of the industry's top experts – including consultants, analysts, vendors and users – and also some of the solutions that help you overcome these challenges ...

October 24, 2012

Gartner, Inc. highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2013, presented during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo ...

October 18, 2012
Assaf Sagi

Preventing a slow application caused by probable resource contention requires a rigorous methodological approach and an appropriate toolset. IT managers, working with business owners, should prioritize critical apps for multi-tenancy and maximum performance ...

October 04, 2012
David Williams

The value that end-user activity monitoring (EUAM) provides has become clear. By monitoring users in real time, you can help ensure application performance and identify errors before they affect anyone. However, many IT organizations continue to wrestle with how to use the data gathered from monitoring activities to increase business understanding and to enhance the quality of the user's experience ...

September 26, 2012
Jason Meserve

If you're the type of person that puts off holiday shopping until the last minute, Christmas 2012 may still seem like forever away, but September 16 marked 100 days until the biggest retail holiday of the year - the time is NOW to have your business-critical applications and systems ready to handle the rush ...

September 20, 2012
Jean-François Huard, Ph.D.

“Big Data” is everywhere. What does it mean? Just as Cloud Computing bursted onto the scene a few years ago, it depends on whom you ask ...

September 17, 2012

Ongoing hype around private cloud computing is creating misperceptions about private cloud, according to Gartner. To help reduce the hype and identify the real value of private cloud computing for IT leaders, Gartner explains five common misconceptions about private cloud ...

September 13, 2012
Andrew Frey

CMOs and CIOs must join forces in order to connect with today's consumer across new channels including mobile devices and social networks. However marketers often point to their lack of alignment with the company's IT department as the biggest obstacle to reaching today's consumers ...

September 10, 2012
Russ Miller

For those of us who handle IT change requests on a daily basis, the process can seem as onerous as a Sisyphean task. In this case, rather than a boulder rolling back down the hill, it is the backlog of RFCs that seem to grow every time you complete a request. Let’s face it - the requests are not going to stop coming. The business is trying to change faster, so they need IT to implement change faster. In the end, it is all about doing as much as you can with what you have. Following ITIL best practices and using a solid change management tool goes a long way, but how can the whole task be made less Sisyphean? The answer may come from borrowing some of the lessons learned from application development ...

August 23, 2012
Pete Goldin

The explosion in Big Data proves that most organizations have the monitoring part down. The challenge is what to do with all the data, once collected. How can you correlate and analyze Big Data, and make some sense out of it? This is the key to the future of APM ...

August 22, 2012
Pete Goldin

The results of the APMdigest Big Data survey are in – revealing significant increases in the growth of IT environments, volume and diversity of performance metrics, and data monitoring frequency. The survey also shows "APM-generated Big Data" as a specific use case of the broader Big Data problem, typically requiring analysis and correlation of real-time data for operational impact ...

August 10, 2012
Paul Muller

There are probably more myths and misunderstandings about the term DevOps than there are hard facts. I recently sat down with Gene Kim and Patrick Debois - two of the DevOps movement's most widely practiced individuals - to cut through the noise. We swapped experiences and discussed how a CIO should be thinking about DevOps, when to consider a DevOps approach, the business case for adopting it, patterns of success and patterns of failure. We agreed that there are three general attributes that provide a good indication that DevOps might help your organization ...

August 07, 2012
Chris Pfauser and Cindy LaChapelle

While organizations generally agree that ITIL-based process improvements are a "good" thing, executives often struggle to measure quantifiable benefits of investment in the framework. We have found that an effective approach to ITIL is characterized by a manageable yet scalable implementation, a focus on people and skills issues, and ongoing measurement that takes a comprehensive view of the enterprise-wide impact of process maturity ...

July 25, 2012
Shweta Darbha

Today, numerous internal and external audiences are using a variety of mobile devices to access business services that increase efficiency and productivity by enhancing communication and collaboration ... This article will explore strategies to enhance the mobile experience for three of the key audiences that regularly use mobile to engage with businesses: Customers, Employees and Partners ...

July 18, 2012
Antonio Piraino

Why is it acceptable to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, on a week or even year's worth of integration or fire-fighting, spent by your best engineers, on things that should be automated, more intuitive or just plane simpler to take on? Just because they’re working hard, doesn’t mean you aren’t wasting valuable assets on the opportunity cost of time that could otherwise be spent on more innovative and revenue generating activities. I’ve compiled a list of ten factors in IT operations that help speed up that time to value ...

July 09, 2012
Dennis Gullotti

With the emergence of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), the Internet is experiencing a major upgrade that will change the way it communicates. While invisible to most Internet users, IPv6 means added complexity to the way browsers and devices connect to the Internet and how services operate and are accessed by users. This complexity has the potential to slow down and disrupt critical services that businesses and individuals rely on every day ...

June 18, 2012
Bob Tarzey

Quocirca conducted a research project across the USA and Europe to investigate what would be top of mind for CIOs and their management teams in 2012. We asked respondents to select their top 5 priorities from a list of 15 hot IT issues. These ranged from desktop upgrades, through various types of cloud deployment and network issues to improving the way applications are delivered ...

June 13, 2012

If done right, APM can save you money in a variety of ways. Experts from across the industry have provided some insight on the many – and sometimes unexpected – ways APM can save your organization money ...

June 11, 2012
Hannah Patterson

Multisourced IT operating models are increasingly common and offer many potential benefits ... One way to address the challenges posed by multisourcing is through a discrete Service Integration and Management (SIAM) function. An effective SIAM function enables organizations to take advantage of the flexibility and innovation of multisourcing and standard services while delivering integrated services to the business ...

May 24, 2012
Russell Rothstein

Online user reviews have completely changed the way we make buying decisions as consumers. We've decided to take the success of B2C social networking and review sites and apply them to the market for APM and other enterprise IT products - meaning to provide IT professionals with a community platform to share reviews and connect with each other to make the best buying decision ...

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