IT has changed the way we run our business and undoubtedly, most organizations nowadays run enterprise applications that automate their mission critical business processes. Most of the time, however, half the IT projects are delivered over budget or fail to meet business objectives.

To keep costs low while increasing revenues and improving customer satisfaction, IT initiatives need to be aligned with business priorities and this calls for a change in the way IT is managed. Mercury Interactive, a provider of business technology optimization (BTO) solutions, advocates that organizations take the BTO approach -- to look at their existing IT infrastructure and optimize it to ensure the availability and performance of applications to serve their business. This approach would help an organization identify how each component in the IT infrastructure affects its business process.

Mercury"s BTO approach focuses on three critical IT functions, one of which is application management. The other two functions are IT governance and application delivery. IT governance provides visibility into and control over different processes within the IT infrastructure to ensure that processes are fulfilled. Application delivery, meanwhile, ensures the quality and performance of applications, and that they are delivered without interruption.

Today, most management efforts have been systems-centric where the management of IT infrastructures have been focused on monitoring and managing system components. However, true management requires application management that addresses the performance and readiness of applications for production from end-to-end, and its overall impact on business and end user experience, says Brian Spring, Mercury"s application management technical practice manager for Asia Pacific.

Systems-centric management makes it difficult to identify how the multitude of components in the IT infrastructure is communicating with each other. It is hard to determine what and where things are going wrong, Spring adds.

This approach also relies on complex correlation rules where organizations have to monitor all events, write complex rules and attempt to work out a way to solve the problem. "Even if all the data and rules were available, you might not even work out a solution because it is difficult to identify which applications are impacting your end users, and how you can prioritize that," he explains.

Consequently, organizations lack clear visibility into applications and IT services availability and performance. This also poses a challenge for the organizations to measure how severe unplanned and constant changes can impact their business, in addition to how much and how long it will take for them to recover from any impact.

On the other hand, management efforts that take on the application management approach, especially from the end user perspective, focuses on what the business really needs.

"This approach aids prioritization. It helps you prioritize based on workload and allows you to focus on the critical process of applications that enables you to do business," says Spring.

Spring adds that this approach also puts systems issues into context where system-centric information is used in relation to the end user experience. "If I knew which application is supporting the end user experience and the component that is supporting that service, then I can monitor the relevant elements in the infrastructure, map them together and correlate the performance," he elaborates.

"We are truly looking at the critical applications from the end user perspective and bridging that with the entire infrastructure."

Mercury"s Business Availability Centre is one solution that addresses these challenges. It provides a single top-down view of business and the relevant IT services associated with user availability and system performance -- all in a single dashboard. It also automates the process of measuring and reporting to agreed-upon service levels.

To manage change and configuration, Business Availability Centre maps IT services to the applications and infrastructure elements so that IT personnel are aware of the application topology and alerted when changes are made.

"Application specific diagnostics ensure that when problems occur it can identify, isolate, triage and diagnose the problem in specific environments quickly to reduce mean time to repair," says Spring.

With Business Availability Centre, organizations are able to understand the availability and performance of all their critical enterprise applications that users are currently using. More importantly, it helps decision makers align IT with business priorities by providing a top down business and customer view into services that IT provides to the business.

"Until now systems management only allowed IT to provide a view into the infrastructure availability, merely making decision makers reactive to user complaints," says Spring.

In addition, Business Availability Centre incorporates Mercury"s SiteScope "agentless" architecture that allows system administrators to monitor distributed systems from a centralized location without the need to install agents or software on production systems. It is implemented as a Java server application, and a user utilizes a web browser to view status information and make configuration changes. It runs on the server as a daemon process, monitors system parameters, sends alerts, and generates summary reports.

Providing all these capabilities is one thing, but ensuring that implementation and results are achieved in weeks and not years (as in the case with system management) would be the compelling driver to increase the adoption of application management solutions in the enterprise. "Organizations usually want to see value from the deployment straight away," Spring says.

Deployment options

Mercury, in its continuous efforts to help organizations kick-start the deployment of application management, is offering a managed service that ensures the solution can be up and running, and providing value within weeks.

Mercury"s managed services option provides the infrastructure, resources and expertise for faster deployment at a lower cost, says Spring. The outsourced infrastructure includes the database, applications, and global monitoring locations, if desired. All data is accessed via a common web interface which is password protected. Companies that rely on the managed services require only one "owner" to lead the effort, he explains.

Spring recommends that organizations start with this approach to realize faster time to value and lower total cost of ownership as opposed to traditional in-house implementations. This approach, he says, reduces time to value by 66 percent and total cost of ownership by an average of 20 percent.

For web-based business applications, organizations can deploy application management for their critical business applications in just a few hours, says Spring. Mercury"s managed services consultants can work with organizations to help them configure alerts, thresholds, and service levels.

In addition, organizations will benefit from the knowledge transfer and on-going mentoring that comes with the service. They can also contact Mercury"s dedicated technical account manager or the 24x7 network operations center for assistance in data analysis and problem isolation.

Most importantly, a managed services environment is a safe "sandbox" for organizations to try out various monitoring strategies before determining which is best and what needs to be fine-tuned, says Spring.

"It is very common for companies, once they have a stronger understanding of application management, to redefine what they monitor, the frequency, the locations and the service level agreements. Reporting and analytic requirements can change as well. This redefining and fine-tuning process is included in the managed services offering at no additional cost to the customer and is guided by our consultants," he explains.

Organizations can also opt for two other deployment strategies: in-house deployment with Mercury"s professional services or the hybrid approach. Companies that opt for traditional in-house implementation with professional services can augment their internal knowledge with on-site skilled services consultants. The consultants will help companies set up the solution in their existing infrastructure, instil the necessary skills in their internal staff and implement processes that tightly fit their organization.

The fastest, most cost-effective way to implement an in-house solution, Spring says, is the hybrid approach. "Begin with the managed service and then migrate in-house once the organization is well-trained and the application well-tuned," he adds.

In the first phase, organizations will benefit from the pre-deployed architecture and expertise. Instead of a typical implementation with professional services, the hybrid approach enables companies to receive on-going mentoring with managed services consultants as well as zero downtime upgrades to new versions as they become available, he says.