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“Technology, will increasingly need to manage the platform from an integrative perspective in order to support mission critical business requirements.” - Cameron Haight / Research Vice President / Gartner, Inc. / Gartner Webcast

SOLUTIONS

Application Service Management (ASM)



Market Situation: Drivers & Trends


Custom enterprise applications are mission-critical to the success of businesses today. As a result of sophisticated and easy-to-use application middleware development platforms (i.e. BEA WebLogic, Oracle Fusion, IBM WebSphere), applications are built more quickly and rapidly than the past.

Due to the expected benefits - agility, productivity, flexibility & extensibility - and the dynamic and highly competitive nature of this worldwide economy, companies are quickly deploying service-oriented architecture (SOA) based apps (i.e. ESB, BPEL, Web Services) and other complex composite applications based on standard development frameworks such as J2EE, Portal, etc.


The Problem: Complications & Business Implications


Listen to ClearApp’s VP of Marketing, Rob Greer, speak about the management challenges facing IT organizations deploying complex composite applications with Fritz Nelson of Information Week.

One of the key benefits for moving to SOA, abstraction, is a complication for those supporting QA, staging and production operations. Multiple layers of abstraction hide key relationships requiring ‘specialized’ expertise (i.e. the developers & architects who built the applications) to be brought in when applications don’t perform, fail to deliver expected results, need to be changed, don’t provide necessary ‘health’ metrics, etc.

Another key benefit, the ability to change quickly, is yet another complication for the application support teams. Relationships change when new components are added, modified or removed, exponentially increasing the complexity of managing the application environment.

The combination of these complications creates an ‘IT Visibility Gap’ - due to lack of ‘business context’- the minute the apps move from development to QA, staging, or production.

What about the status quo? Traditional approaches that collect individual metrics at the code level and require teams of developers to link these pieces of information together to create custom views, reports and dashboards, often provide a partial view of what is really going on within the enterprise applications.


Resulting Business Implications


  • Cannot measure the application service levels as promised to the business, customer, supplier or partner
  • Takes too long to solve problems (MTTR is too high) resulting in loss of productivity, lower customer service ratings and decreased employee morale
  • Too costly to support - which contradicts the ROI expected out of SOA investments in the first place

The Solution: Application Service Management (ASM)


‘Business context’ is required to bridge the ’IT Visibility Gap’- make order out of the chaos - so that IT can perform the requisite IT service management (ITSM) functions.

How? A ‘top-down’ approach is required which dynamically associates the underlying components to the application services being delivered.

The solution must:

  • discover components
  • deeply analyze components
  • capture complex relationships between services, components & run-time environments (i.e. JVMs)
  • dynamically adjust to relationship changes
  • take into account required application services (i.e. BPEL, portal, web services, etc.), facilities (i.e. performance monitoring, root-cause analysis, etc.) and platforms (i.e. WebSphere, WebLogic, Oracle, etc.)

ClearApp’s ASM apprroach is the solution to this management dilemma. ASM enables the dynamic and continuous correlation of the business services provided by applications to the underlying code components supporting those services. As a result, enterprises are able to intelligently automate many of the APM, IT service management (ITSM) and application change management tasks required to effectively align IT with the business.


Value to Customer:

Enterprises gain the necessary visibility and business-level context required to:

  • maximize application service levels
  • reduce the mean time to repair (MTTR)
  • attain the requisite ROI from their service-oriented architecture (SOA) investments

Next Steps to Get on the ASM Path