Application Management

Application Management is perhaps the single most important function in any IT shop. After all, without application management and discipline it is impossible to offer service levels to end users of any stripe. That is why it is surprising how few organizations take application management seriously.

Many companies allow their development organizations to build applications and then just drop them over the fence for operations management to deal with. This approach makes no sense for either party. Poor scalability is often a feature of poor development, rather than poor infrastructure. The problem was exacerbated in recent times by the frenzy of poorly coordinated application purchases by disparate line-of-business executives. Business organizations cannot reasonably expect acceptable response times if they have not worked closely with IT and operations before making purchase decisions. If that sounds harsh, it's not without cause--RedMonk makes no apology for recommending a systematic architectural approach to application delivery and consumption. Without cooperation between different parts of the organization that is not possible.

Traditionally, enterprise systems management vendors have sold to operations departments rather than other constituencies. Most of the better known vendors in the space cut their teeth in ops shops and their skills and product heritages illustrate this bias. Other vendors have focused on related functions-- from software aimed at development organizations with formal software change management strategies to developer scalability issues. A new breed of tools vendors are helping to define more lightweight approaches to middleware management, rather than the heavyweight agent-based management frameworks of the past.

Helping the drive to lightweight is the fact that standards are emerging, and more importantly being implemented, which are bringing new levels of interoperability to the management market. Standards-based approaches such as Application Response Management (ARM) Bluefin in storage, Common Information Model (CIM), Java Management Extensions (JMX), WMI (Windows Management instrumentation), and Open Management Interface (OMI) are all gaining traction. Understanding how these standards fit together will help organizations make the right systems management decisions and RedMonk tracks them carefully.

Going forward successful vendors will be those that help users to break down the somewhat artificial distinctions between these different functions. In this light it will be interesting to see how HP's new strategy of appealing to developers indirectly through its BEA and Microsoft partnerships plays out--RedMonk applauds the company's understanding that it must drive a strategy that appeals to developers as well as ops staffs. The different functions of applications, operations and quality assurance need to come together to ensure that applications are suitably instrumented and manageable.

The final part of the app management puzzle is process. A thorough approach to process automation is not an optional extra. Systems management is all about driving human costs out of the infrastructure equation. That means a combination of workflow tools and process maturity through best practice adoption.