ASP News Review

This article is reprinted from the September 2001 ASP News Review, a monthly newsletter that examines and reports on the ASP and ASP-related industries.

Migrating computing out of the enterprise into the Internet environment often means taking a very different, Internet-centric view of how to operate and manage applications and infrastructure. One element is learning how to work with service providers who are external to the enterprise. This should be more than simply adding service level management disciplines into the systems management mix. Even when every individual component of the system is functioning within its permitted limits, the combined effect may in some circumstances still add up to a substandard user experience.

BMC At a Glance

Headquarters: Houston Texas Founded: 1980 Employees: 7,300 Main business activity: Vertical ASP Target Market: Enterprise Management: CEO Bob Beauchamp Funding: NYSE listed (ticker: BMC) $1.5 billion revenues, $42.4 million net profit (year ended 31 March 2001)

Managing quality of service effectively for a complex, Internet-centric application therefore has two important ingredients. One element is being able to take a holistic view of the complete system rather than monitoring selected individual components. The other is to make sure that monitoring measures the quality of service that's being delivered to the end user, rather than simply measuring what's happening inside the data centre.

BMC Software has made a name for itself in the enterprise systems management sector for taking a holistic approach, by providing tools that monitor user experience at the application level. Last year it decided to take that experience outside of its traditional enterprise stamping ground into the Internet environment, with its acquisition of SiteAngel, a vendor and provider of website monitoring services.

"We wanted to complement our heritage products with something that looked at performance outside the firewall," Mary Nugent, general manager of BMC's service provider solutions division, told ASP News Review.

Its reason for choosing SiteAngel was that the service goes further than first-generation site monitoring tools. Rather than simply pinging URLs to test whether individual servers are available, BMC wanted to be able to monitor end-to-end application performance — "How is your transaction performing, all the way from the front end through to the database," said Nugent.

End-to-End Experience
SiteAngel provides this by continuously simulating the actions of users as they follow through processes on a website — such as searching through a catalog, selecting and ordering a product — and measuring the complete end-to-end experience. Of course, the process could equally well be updating sales call notes in a sales automation application, or entering voucher details into a purchase ledger.

This gives the holistic view. The other ingredient is to monitor the true experience for Internet-based users, wherever they happen to be connecting from.

This effectively rules out selling SiteAngel as a product, since by definition buyers would only be able to locate the tool at their own sites, defeating the object of the exercise. It has to be an Internet-resident service.