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Application Performance Management (APM (News - Alert)) is gaining momentum in the industry, in light of its effectiveness of quickly finding and tackling performance problems for Web applications and narrowing down bottlenecks in the IT infrastructure.

One provider of application and network performance management solutions, OPNET Technologies, has gone through some game-changing acquisitions as of late. Just six months ago, the company acquired Clarus Systems, and just recently was acquired by Riverbed Technologies. Among many other things, these acquisitions exhibit the importance of Unified Communications (News - Alert) (UC) today.  

Currently, OPNET's solutions deliver broad visibility and monitoring across infrastructure domains as well as deep data collection and analytics to enable efficient root cause diagnosis. These solutions have been proven in thousands of customer environments across the world, including corporate and government enterprises, defense agencies, network service providers and network equipment manufacturers. 

These days, it is key to detect a performance problem and address it immediately. And, Riverbed is one of the only companies that have the end-to-end suit related to accelerated performance, according to Gurmeet Lamba (News - Alert), VP of R & D and chief architect, UC Management, OPNET (recently acquired by Riverbed). In fact, acquiring OPNET gave Riverbed an APM suite and new business unit called Riverbed (News - Alert) Performance Management (RPM).

“The new tablets may be cool, but in my mind performance management and optimization is really the new cool,” Lamba told TMCnet in an exclusive interview at ITEXPO Miami 2013. “Right now you see tablets, social media, cloud computing and a lot of innovation in the industry, but all of it can come to a screeching hault in the back end infrastructure doesn’t keep up with the performance.”

The whole idea behind APM is figuring out where the performance bottlenecks are such as network, servers, Web servers and clients. Lamba shared five dimensions of APM including:

• End user experience
• Application discovery
• Application component monitoring
• Transaction tracing
• Analytics

So, how does UC fit in to APM?

“UC is ripe to start utilizing APM approaches because UC is no longer locked down PBX,” explained Lamba.

UC applications are IT apps, incorporating real-time communications like VoIP, video communications, Telepresence (News - Alert), IM/Presence, and Unified Messaging. Traditional definitions of APM are sound, but implementations must adapt to current technologies and extended to provide end-to-end monitoring of service availability and performance of UC as well as real-time communications.

But, with APM comes real-time communication challenges as APM implementations are more transactional and do not address real-time. This creates the need for extensions for APM implementations that are deeper in the domain of UC. Fortunately, OPNET’s UC Expert, a product extending Riverbed APM implementation, goes deep into end-to-end management and monitoring UC.

Additionally, UC needs extensions, which impact the four pillars of end-to-end UC performance management as applied to APM. These extensions including proactive automated testing, performance monitoring with deep domain plug-ins, configuration management, and analytics.

“Overall, RPM is the most comprehensive APM product suite in UC that gives u true end-to-end management and monitoring of applications,” continued Lamba.

Lamba will be speaking in an ITEXPO session tomorrow, Wednesday, January 30th at 2:30 pm entitled, “Time to Rethink Performance Management.” He will educate the audience about APM and how it relates to UC by answering questions like: Do traditional APM implementations work for these apps? How can your IT team monitor service availability of an end-user’s softphone using traditional APM implementations? What about a ring-no-answer on Unified Messaging? Will a misconfiguration in the routing table in the call management application resulting in poor end user experience be detected?   

To find out more about OPNET Technologies and Vice President of R&D and Chief Architect Gurmeet Lamba, visit the company at ITEXPO Miami happening now in Miami, Florida.  ITEXPO is the only gathering where the community of communications and technology buyers, sellers, resellers, and manufacturers meet to forge relationships and close deals. Lamba is speaking during “Time to Rethink Performance Management.” For more information on ITEXPO, click here.