Busy Data Center

Is Your Network Ready for the Video Deluge?

By on May 16, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Last week at the Interop show in Las Vegas, our friends at Network Instruments surveyed attendees about their use of video conferencing in their organizations. After covering video conferencing for a number of years at Network World, I’m happy to see that 83 percent of respondents said they’ve deployed some type of video conferencing, but I am a little shocked that they claim to reserve only 10 percent of network traffic for it.

Really? Only 10 percent? If video is really becoming that pervasive, than IT organizations are going to have to start allocating a little more pipe to video bits and bytes. Heck, according to those same survey respondents, two-way video is already taking up on average 29 percent of available bandwidth. So they’re already in a hole and it’s only going to get worse as those surveyed said that number will hit 40 percent within the next year.

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IT is the Best of Times and the Worst of Times

By on May 15, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

IT is often a tale of two cities.  Similar to Dickens’ classic opening lines, IT can be both the best of times and the worst of times, a place of reason and one of foolishness, a place upon which every part of the business depends and a place where nothing really matters to the business.

A good example of this is when that dream project comes along; the one that will take careers to the next level because it is so strategic; the one that is sure to change the competitiveness of the entire business. But, just when the project gets interesting key project team members can’t focus on it because of an unexpected surge of repetitive tasks, mundane tasks that, if they are done well, no one will notice, but if done poorly, everyone will notice.

You know the kind of tasks I am talking about. These are the kinds of tasks that often wouldn’t even be required if maintenance had been done properly in the first place or if the change requests had been implemented completely instead of one or two checks being skipped.

They are the kind of tasks that IT staffs hate because the tasks force the staff to turn away from interesting work to spend time and attention on tedious work.

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Architects

Letting You In On The Best Kept Technology Secret

By on May 14, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Tom Petty said it best when he sang, “The waiting is the hardest part.” When testing applications, waiting for resources, waiting to get the code into production and waiting to deliver high-quality apps to the business can be the most difficult part.

There are several reasons for the wait, but none of them seem to justify the pain it causes. Architects, developers and even operations want to better understand how applications will behave in a production environment. Yet the resources available for testing are often sparse or offered with limitations, and teams working to reduce costs, increase speed to market and improve quality aren’t able to do all three.

That is unless they tap the capabilities in service virtualization technologies, which are now available from ITKO, a CA Technologies company, IBM with its Green Hat acquisition, Parasoft and HP.

“Service virtualization eliminates the wait time for people; people waiting for something to be ready to test, people waiting to have access to resources,” says Theresa Lanowitz, industry analyst and founder of Voke Inc.

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Service Assurance Weekly Reading List

By on May 12, 2012 in Uncategorized

Did you miss these six stories this week? Get caught up now:

  1. Twitter Tech Support: How Effective Is Tweeting a Tech Problem?
    Comcast pioneered Twitter support and others are starting to follow the lead. Does your company offer tech support via Twitter?
  2. The IT paradox: A diminished role in technology, but greater clout in the business
    As technology becomes easier to use, it becomes more complex internally, and IT is less necessary in some ways, yet more essential in others.
  3. Oracle / Google Verdict Suggests Open-ness Must Be Licensed
    The battle over Java licensing results in some interesting implications over licensing “open” software.
  4. Application performance management tools: A must-have for the cloud
    As organizations move apps to the cloud, APM tools become more important.
  5. Sides dig in as FBI warns of ‘going dark’ in online era
    Privacy and civil liberty advocates argue the FBI has not established the need to amend wiretap law to create online ‘back doors’ to track crime.
  6. Where is the energy spent inside my app?
    A whitepaper from Microsoft that shows what drains a smartphone battery.

What’s on your reading list this week? Leave a comment below or tweet your response to @CASvcAssur.

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Greener Grass

IT Employees Engaged But Not Married to the Job

By on May 11, 2012 in Uncategorized

Are your IT employees happy on the job?

The good news is that three quarters of IT workers surveyed by Randstad Technologies are engaged on the job and loyal to the organization they work for. The bad news is, despite the stated loyalty and happiness, just over half of the same employees said they plan to look for other employment when job market opens up a bit more.

You read that right: Despite feeling engaged at work and loyal to the company, the latest Randstad Engagement Index shows that IT people are a restless bunch and are willing to jump ship for a grass-is-greener opportunity. With 59% of surveyed workers believing the job market will improve in 2012, it won’t be long before some of your key workers start sharpening their resumes, pressing those interview suits and looking to move on.

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It’s Madness: May Mainframe Madness!

By on May 10, 2012 in CA Technologies on APM

May is not just about May flowers, Mother’s Day, and Memorial Day, it’s also May Mainframe Madness! If you’re an organization that relies on mainframes for internal productivity and/or customer-facing applications, you should swing by CA Technologies ongoing virtual event happening until May 31, 2012.

The event, which features an exhibit hall with over 20 booths covering a range of mainframe topics, is holding a number of live chats and keynote sessions that you can enjoy right from your desk. For readers of this blog that care about application performance, the one session you don’t want to miss is this Monday (May 14) at 11 A.M. EST when EMA’s Julie Craig presents, “Don’t Let Managing Application Performance Management Manage Your Business.”

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Citrix Synergy 2012

Service Assurance and Citrix XenDesktop

By on May 9, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Citrix Synergy 2012CA Technologies is at the Citrix Synergy 2012 show at the San Francisco Moscone Center this week (May 9-11, 2012). One of the demos in our booth will be focused on Service Assurance solutions from CA Technologies, our integrated solution suite spanning Application Performance Management, Infrastructure Management, Service Operations Management and Executive Insight.

XenDesktop, the new desktop virtualization solution from Citrix, will be a major highlight at the show. Citrix customers are facing the challenge of migrating to and running XenDesktop in production, and are asking, “How do I assure business services as my environment changes? How do I ensure an optimum end-user experience?”

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Cloud

Cloud Impairs App Troubleshooting, survey says

By on May 9, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Attendees at this week’s Interop conference in Las Vegas proved what the majority already assumed to be true: there are numerous benefits to adopting cloud computing and cloud services. Yet a survey of 102 network engineers on the show floor revealed another fact: cloud causes some problems when trying to troubleshoot application performance.

The poll conducted by Network Instruments (a CA Technologies partner) found that 70% “indicated that their ability to troubleshoot applications worsened or remained the same after migrating to the cloud.” The informal Interop poll results echo sentiment from the company’s larger State of the Network survey released earlier this year, which showed that cloud blurs IT’s view into the end-user experience.

Now the 70% is a combined number; some saying it worsened and some saying it remained the same. Still the fact that cloud hinders application performance troubleshooting should concern adopters. Today application performance can significantly impact a company’s brand and reputation if that performance is externally or customer facing. A lessened ability to understand that performance is not a positive for cloud. And for those saying cloud keeps thing status quo that could be negative too – depending on how well they are able to monitor application performance on premise.

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CA Executive Insight

Speak to the Business in the Language of the Business

By on May 8, 2012 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

The expression ‘Lost in Translation’ has a special significance for me. I was born in a region of the world where cold meant any time temperature drops below 85 degrees Fahrenheit.  At the age of 10, I left the familiar for a place where winter temperature dropped below freezing, people wore things that looked like they just came off of large furry animals, and I had to learn English to survive.

As someone who’s now fluent in two languages, I have an insight a person who can’t speak multiple languages may never have. Language is about connection, trust and relationships. To be fluent in a language is more than knowing the right amount of words. It means being able to understand the nuances of the culture of that language and with that understanding, the ability to connect and gain trust.

The separation between IT and the business has many parallels to my early life experiences with learning a new language and adapting to a new culture.  IT and the business have distinct cultures and ways of communicating. For IT to be able to bridge the gap between the two cultures, the language spoken has to illustrate IT’s understanding of the value system of the rest of the enterprise.

Changing how IT communicates its contributions with the rest of the enterprise starts with changing the information it shares with executives and business stakeholders. IT’s strategic role in enabling business success means IT is also a rich source of high-value metrics that are early indicators of success or failure of business results.

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Service Assurance Weekly Reading List

By on May 5, 2012 in Uncategorized

Six items you might have missed this week that we think are worth reading:

  1. The ‘Occupy IT’ Movement of Organizations
    Business units and its constituents are now employing an “Occupy IT” movement due to, in part, the belief (whether right or wrong) that IT has morphed into the 1%.
  2. Time to Host a ‘Hackathon’ of Your Own
    Mike Vizard says companies should have business people and developers sit down together to hack code. Does your organization do this?
  3. BYOD policy bites vacationing CEO
    Mimecast CEO Peter Bauer recently found himself at the intersection of consumerization and IT management, falling victim to personal data loss as the result of the internal management policy he himself helped establish.
  4. Cloud Could Cut $12 Billion from US Government Annual Deficit: Study
    The cloud won’t prevent the government from buying $400 hammers, but the technology could save taxpayers a few bucks.
  5. Cracking Classic Technology: The TRS-80 Model 100
    The “Trash-80” was the computing platform of choice at my junior high school. Even then they were outdated.
  6. Yesterday The Boston Globe ended all your tomorrows
    This might be more inside-journalism but is yet another example of how the digital age is changing the way we communicate.

What’s on your reading list this week? Share in the comments below or tweet us @CASvcAssur.

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Dragon

APM is King in 2012

By on May 4, 2012 in CA Technologies on APM

Forget the Dragon. 2012 is the Year of Application Performance Management (APM), according to research firm Quocirca. Maybe Year of the Dragon sounds sexier to the average person, but for IT executives, ensuring critical applications run smoothly and the end-user experience is superb is far more important.

While the Chinese use a Stem-Branch counting to name the year, Quocirca used more traditional methods to come to the conclusion that APM is the IT king in 2012. The company surveyed some 500 senior IT and business executives about 15 initiatives for the year and APM came out on top by “quite a margin,” besting virtualization, private and public cloud, and other initiatives. What’s amazing to me is that only 82% of CIOs and 66% of IT executives agreed that users will expect better performance from online applications in 2012. Shouldn’t that be 100% on both counts?

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How the Beauty and Fragrance Giant Coty, Inc. Avoids Blemishes to the Business

By on May 3, 2012 in CA Technologies on APM

Coty, a leading manufacturer and distributor of beauty and fragrance products, has more than 12,000 employees across the globe — and the business’s COE must service each and every one of them.  In the latest edition of SAP Insider Profiles, there’s a great article on how Vishnu Chittem, Coty’s COE Lead Architect leverages Application Performance Management (APM) solutions offered by SAP through its partnership with CA Technologies.  Vishnu’s COE team uses the intuitive dashboards in the APM solution to proactively monitor IT operations and user activity, and to keep tabs on the health of the IT environment’s servers, networks, and applications.

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