Service-Centric Performance Assurance Provides a Strong Fit for Enterprise APM Demands

By Cyril Doussau de Bazignan, Product Marketing Director, InfoVista

In a recent report by Jim Frey, research director at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), EMA evaluated 18 vendors providing application-aware network performance management solutions.  As Jim highlights in his report, these 18 vendors represent a significant number of application-aware network performance management (ANPM) providers and demonstrate the increased relevance of the ANPM discipline, also known as service performance assurance.

To be included in the report and to be recognized as truly application-aware, vendors needed to offer all four of the following functionality categories:

• The ability to discover, recognize and monitor performance at the application level
• The ability to provide some troubleshooting and analysis, which allows IT organizations to reduce mean time to repair
• Capacity planning, which the report defines as “detailed insights into how the network is being used and what (and who) is driving traffic growth”
• Collaborative reports and dashboards

We were pleased by how well our carrier-class platform scored under the scrutiny of enterprise criteria: EMA assessed us a “Strong Value” overall and ranked us “high” (Top 3 overall) in terms of relative vendor strength and “above average” in relative cost efficiency.  The EMA report confirms InfoVista’s successful strategic execution in bringing to market, two years ago, a unified network and application performance assurance platform that fits the needs of large enterprises and service providers.

Because enterprises need to satisfy their business users’ requirements for new collaborative solutions that provide a competitive edge, while also ensuring high quality on existing business-critical applications, demand for visibility at the application and end-user levels continues to grow significantly.  At the same time, enterprises need to keep a lid on their IT and network spending.  Hence, the report validates several key trends:

• Assessing the quality of experience of business users and lines of business is now a must-have for IT
• The new performance assurance standards impose some service modeling capabilities that enable companies to assess how well IT is supporting the business
• Ease of use and collaboration capabilities for the various groups within IT and IT’s service constituencies are becoming key decision criteria when selecting a performance assurance platform
• Interoperability and the ability to implement some automatic adjustments to changing “environmental” conditions are important criteria to assure a low TCO

On the third bullet point, InfoVista’s unified network and application performance management dashboard received kudos in the EMA report, which stated “InfoVista’s Vista360 sets the pace for graphically rich, intuitive dashboards, featuring live data and rapid navigation plus full configurability to serve virtually any internal or external constituency in a secure manner.”

Do not hesitate to contact us and we would be glad to also share the profile on InfoVista that EMA did in relation to the ANPM report.