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Welcome
to Common Sense: IT Procurement News
Common Sense is a program focused on helping you,
the IT procurement/purchasing professional, access the information
you need to:
- understand the value you are receiving from
Compuware products
- identify opportunities to cut costs.
We hope you find Common Sense both helpful and interesting.
It is our goal to provide useful information to help you build
a compelling business case, one you can convey with confidence,
that hard-earned IT budget money is not being squandered.
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Are Poorly Performing Applications Cutting
Into Your Company's Business Potential?
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"There are two overwhelming reasons
why IT organizations should want to tune applications. The first
reason is to save money. The second reason is to increase
customer satisfaction. Poor performance yields high costs. Those
costs include millions of dollars annually in unnecessary processing
due to un-tuned application software. Also included are the
costly hardware upgrades required due to excess CPU utilization,
increased batch processing time and/or unacceptable response times."
¹
Sales and earnings are the most measurable as well
as the most commonly used indicators of a company's success or
failure. While you may think the burden to meet these numbers
falls on the sales staff, it also lands on the shoulders of the
IT department, as IT manages your company's business-critical
applications. These applications, which process daily business
and dollars, are as much a part of your company's sales strategy
as the marketing experts or account managers. In many IT shops,
the pressure to produce along with the selling team translates
into developing, and/or outsourcing development of, as much business
code as possible, but unfortunately without the luxury of time
to give enough attention to "real world" performance.
Business-critical applications have one job: to generate business.
And if these applications aren't pushing business through the
system as efficiently as possible, they're not contributing to
the bottom line of the organization to the degree they should.
Analyst Carey Schwaber puts it
this way in a Forrester
report: |
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"...many software development organizations still treat performance
like an afterthought, paying it too little attention too late
in the life cycle. Our interviews confirmed what we hear in our
ongoing conversations with Forrester clients: IT shops habitually
pay insufficient attention to performance during development,
either ignoring performance altogether or simply measuring it
and conducting perfunctory tuning before deployment. The results
of this neglect can be grim." ²
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If your company is taking the "road most traveled"
to manage application performance, and subsequently missing the
mark on SLAs and business goals, it might be time to change direction
to work toward a more profitable outcome for your business.
Top ^
1 Loosley, Chris; Controlling Application Performance: What
Every CIO Should Know, Technical Support, October
1998
2 Schwaber, Carey; Performance-Driven Software
Development, Forrester Best Practices, February 28,
2006 |
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Application Performance
Management: Why Should You Care?
No matter what discipline an IT organization
adopts, most application performance management (APM) methodologies
stem from the same core principle: The earlier an application is
tuned, the greater the payoff. What is the payoff? According
to Cheryl Watson, highly respected z/Series and MVS application
tuning expert,
"The resources you can save by tuning or proper capacity planning
are CPU, software costs, storage, DASD, tapes and paper, staff time,
elapsed time, user time and customer satisfaction."¹
Watson's advice makes sense from a technical
perspective, but how does it translate to your company's bottom
line?
Here's how: An application that has not been optimally tuned, tested
and "debugged" burns time, churns unnecessary CPU cycles, claims
unnecessary DASD (physical storage) and, most importantly, might
not be available to generate business - the reason it should
no longer be optional for the entire IT organization to embrace
an APM practice. For IT to keep pace with competitive demands, meet
ever-changing technological requirements and, most importantly,
keep applications available and running as efficiently as possible
for maximum revenue generation, an APM strategy is essential. Carey Schwaber of
Forrester echoes these sentiments:
"By 2010, performance-driven development
concepts will be more widespread, and one-third of the organizations
that today do little more than load testing will have adopted
performance-driven development practices. Service-level management
(SLM) puts a sticker price on poor software performance."
²
But it's important to note
that the level of APM sophistication and the commitment your company
is willing to make determine how much money can be saved.
Forrester has found that companies making even a conservative
effort (see Figure 1) toward proper APM practices are realizing
benefits such as:
-
acceptance criteria for
making go/no-go decisions
-
reducing cost of problem
resolution
-
improving accuracy of
hardware requirement forecasts.
Figure 1:
Evolving toward performance-driven
development adds benefits, reduces costs
February 2006, Best Practices "Performance-Driven Software
Development"
For those companies equipped to engage in what experts call
"performance-driven development," financial rewards are considerable.
According to Forrester, addressing application defects in a performance-driven
IT environment can cost about one-fifth what it
would to address them in an organization operating in "firefighting"
mode. (See Figure 2.)
Figure 2:
Sample economics of a move to performance-driven development
February 2006, Best Practices "Performance-Driven Software
Development"
Top ^
1 Watson, Cheryl;
Why Tune?, Cheryl Watson's Tuning Letter, No. 4,
1999
2 Schwaber, Carey; Performance-Driven Software Development,
Forrester Best Practices, February 28, 2006
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Do
Your IT Professionals Have an Application Performance
Strategy in Place Today?
Download
and share the entire Forrester Best Practices report by Carey Schwaber,
and become a partner with IT in gaining the following benefits for
your company:
- consistently improve the
performance of mission-critical applications
- never again miss a batch window
- improve online response times
- postpone or avoid upgrades
- automate application performance measurement
and analysis
- deliver application performance benefits without
adding personnel
- minimize costs and maximize performance throughout
the application life cycle, during design, build, test, production
and maintenance.
For additional information, click here
to access Compuware's Application Performance Assurance resources.
Top ^
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Next Issue - Sneak Peek
Global outsourcing of computer software promises savings
in the neighborhood of 25-40 percent. That's too significant a cost
reduction for companies to ignore, but with half of all off-shoring
operations falling short of expectations, and cost overruns in the
range of 15-57 percent of the total price tag, buyer's remorse is
rampant.
Next quarter, Common Sense will look at the source of this
remorse, and how to avoid some potentially costly mistakes.
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