The Coles Myer umbrella covers 16 separate brands which, according to senior IT executive Peter Tonkin, each owned its own IT shop, were all operating independently, and suffered from a lot of integration and standardization issues.

"When CIO Peter Mahler joined in 2003 he [wanted to] create a single IT shop operating as a shared service," Tonkin said. "Our strategy is to buy not build, and we want technology stack standardization, and application consolidation, for example, a single SAP [AG product]."

Now Coles Myer is in the midst of "lots of concurrent, large-scale projects" delivering applications that are fit-for-purpose. Tonkin said the applications, which are performance sensitive, need to be robust and, with the organization moving to an integrated architecture, they all have to talk to each other. Application scalability and complexity are also challenges Coles Myer is dealing with during its transformation phase.

With those requirements in place, Tonkin said Coles Myer went shopping for an application performance management solution that simulates and monitors the availability of business-critical, end-user transactions.

"We wanted something to assist in identifying those bottlenecks in the applications [and which] links end users and infrastructure with alerting and diagnostics," he said, adding that the solution had to be repeatable.