Application Management Hinders IT Operations: Report

Sixty-eight percent of those surveyed invested in more than three distinct application and transaction management tools.

Despite increased investments in IT tools to manage business applications and transactions, enterprises are still struggling with transaction availability and the growing complexity of their IT infrastructure, according to a survey of IT executives from BlueStripe Software, a provider in application transaction management solutions. The survey of more than 125 IT executives found that 68 percent have invested in more than three distinct application and transaction management tools.

Regardless of that investment, 71 percent of the businesses surveyed still could not pinpoint the source of business-impacting slowdowns. Other top issues reported include an inability to monitor and support all the technologies that transactions depend on and IT staff needing training to effectively use and deploy the tools. Survey results indicated that the need for multiple application and transaction management tools is driven by increased IT and application system complexity, with 64 percent of organizations having to manage seven or more distinct technologies within their application systems.

"This survey hammers home the point that managing applications and transactions is becoming more complex, and that traditional management tools have not kept pace," said Chris Neal, CEO of BlueStripe Software. "Limited transaction visibility and management data gaps between transactions and the infrastructure hinder the ability of IT operations to maintain transaction availability and performance. Only by following transactions everywhere they go within the infrastructure - hop by hop - can operations teams deal with the dynamic, complex transaction systems in today's enterprises."

Another noteworthy survey result revealed that executives don't see virtualization and cloud technologies as individual management challenges.  Instead, those technologies are two new platforms that IT executives are trying to manage as part of their overall business application systems. In fact, the survey found that the majority is already managing seven or more major technologies within their application systems. Virtualization and cloud only add to the complexity, the survey indicated.

Together with infrastructure support, 58 percent of the responsibility for application performance problems is being placed on teams composed of experts with broad expertise in systems, with less knowledge of the interworkings of application platforms or code. "The difficulty of isolating the cause of an application or transaction performance problem across all of these systems means that IT operations needs management tools that can track transactions wherever they go, isolating where transaction performance is being compromised," the report noted. "Growing application complexity has rendered the current generation of tools unable to help."