Cisco-backed OpTier Inc, which specialises in business transaction monitoring tools, has added an end-user experience assessment line to its product portfolio which will provide IT shops with visibility into how application availability and response times impact on network users.
OpTier Experience Manager is the first expansion of its product line, and will sit alongside the company’s CoreFirst flagship as a tandem for what OpTier calls Business Transaction Management or BTM.
This is something analysts have mooted as the future direction of a movement that started out with Business Service Management, popularised by the likes of BMC Software, HP and CA Inc.
Forrester says that BTM is based on the ability to trace a transaction path through n-tiers of infrastructure components in order to provide visibility into the transaction and a basis to define whether a transaction’s behaviour is normal, or is signalling a performance or availability issue.
It names OpTier and rival Correlsense as providing tools that give visibility into transaction paths and says CA is developing the same sort of capability for Wily.
“A focus for the business from the very get-go has been to develop systems that capture a view of business transactions and make them visible so that we can reduce the chance of an outage or fault impacting on a user,” Motti Tal, co-founder and business development director for OpTier told us.
“By providing software that monitors all the way across to the end point of a business transaction we can significantly improve the way IT is managed.”
OpTier has research which suggests organisations are struggling in this regard, with 72% of IT shops relying on using server/network uptime as a measure of business service visibility.
A third of IT managers are reliant on a dashboard of multiple system metrics, and as many as 57% believe the lack of a single management approach is only adding complexity to the problem.
The introduction of OpTier Experience Manager provides IT with tools that will help in the identification of a problem, but which also provide a primary triage point, OpTier told us.
OpTier said Experience Manager is designed to measure the volume, performance, service levels and availability of all business transactions.
It uses agentless monitoring and helps avoid service outages by improving application visibility and simplifying problem isolation. In addition to monitoring, the product can also be used to run historical analysis and trending of transaction usage by users.
Tieing together OpTier Experience Manager and the CoreFirst software has all the makings of a BTM suite, the company said.
The vendor has its HQ in New York, has around 200 staff and has raised some $110 million in venture capital from Cisco and venture funds.