Application Performance Management

Application performance management tools may be more important for cloud-based endeavors than you might have originally thought.

A recent survey conducted by Orange Business Services, a global integrator of communications solutions for multinational corporations, revealed that demand for application performance management or “APM (News - Alert)” is increasing while moving applications to the cloud.

The results were based on the assessment of APM plans and attitudes among decision makers from 500 multinational corporations in 12 European countries across various industry sectors including financial services, health care, manufacturing, retail and transportation, officials at Orange Business Services (News - Alert) said.

The survey analyzed key areas to better understand plans for consolidation and virtualization. These metrics also provided insight on which applications would be cloud-enabled; attitudes toward using Wide Area Network  (WAN) optimization or APM solutions and service level agreements or “SLAs” requirements.

According to a majority of MNC respondents, Web conferencing, video conferencing and Microsoft (News - Alert) applications are the most likely applications to be virtualized or cloud-enabled.

Of the 500 companies surveyed, only 95 plan to virtualize their call center applications and even fewer plan to virtualize customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, human resources, or other applications.

The selection of applications for the cloud is based on those that are used "off-the-shelf" versus those that are typically customized for unique business use, Orange officials assed.

According to the study 67.6 percent plan to consolidate data centers and servers within the next two years. This trend, according to Orange officials, further validate that consolidation continues to be driven by cost reduction and centralization.

The use of WAN optimization or an application performance management solution among European multinationals is mixed, the survey found. Though 54.4 percent already have a solution in place, 45.6 percent indicate that they still do not currently use WAN optimization or an application delivery performance solution.

According to 69.1 percent of the respondents, application-level SLAs such as application availability is required, while 55.9 percent expect managed network services SLAs such as round trip delay, packet loss and jitter.

“As this study shows, WAN optimization and APM continue to be important to MNCs and most especially when they are moving to the cloud,” said Jean Critcher, solution director at Orange Business Services, in a statement. “As a continuance to achieve the fastest means to cost reduction, these solutions become more justified.”

Orange provides WAN optimization and APM solutions to customers. These solutions enable them to gain double-digit savings to TCO and improvements to productivity while seeing ROI within a year, Critcher added.