News

CA Offers APM as a Service

• By John K. Waters
• April 5, 2013

CA Technologies is launching a new Application Performance Management (APM) solution via its Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. The new APM as a Service (APMaaS) aims to make life easier for IT with a "full-featured" offering designed to monitor billions of transactions in the datacenter, public and private clouds, and hybrid environments.

The CA SaaS platform is a scalable, multi-tenant, "enterprise-hardened" service-delivery platform designed to support a broad range of IT management services. The company's new APMaaS is a "full-featured" offering built on that platform to proactively monitor all end-user transactions, 24x7, across modern, hybrid cloud environments, the company said. It's designed to provide deep application diagnostics for business-critical apps by "proactively identifying, diagnosing and resolving performance problems before they affect end users and disrupt revenue-generating services."

This ability to avoid disrupting the end-user experience is no longer just a competitive advantage, said Aid Galijatovic, CA's principal product manager, but potentially a matter of survival.

"To people who maintain them, applications are like human hearts," Galijatovic said. "If something goes wrong with them for a few seconds -- or, god forbid, a minute -- bad things happen. And both a heart and an enterprise application are part of a pretty complex system."

The end-user experience monitoring capabilities in the APMaaS offering are unified with deep-dive problem-diagnosis features, Galijatovic said, which give users the ability to understand performance issues in context, to pinpoint failures accurately and to speed problem resolution.

The APMaaS model also assuages a major pain point for IT, said Jason Meserve, CA's senior product marketing manager. He cited a recent survey conducted by his company and CIO ("Market Pulse, Application Performance Management," Sept 2012), which found that only 16 percent of executives report having confidence in their ability to meet end-user expectations, which is down 14 percent from the previous year.

"The IT guys need to be able to deploy management tools that they buy from companies like us quickly," Meserve said. "But they also need to be able to [quickly] deploy the applications that they're building themselves. Everyone wants everything faster, better and cheaper, despite limited resources and product-level expertise. Life is getting harder for them. We're trying to make it easier."

CA had been providing an on-premises APM solution for about 13 years when it acquired WatchMouse in July 2011. WatchMouse brought a number of assets into the CA portfolio, including a globally distributed infrastructure of more than 60 monitoring stations in about 40 countries. The company's solution replicates real-user transactions from these locations to provide "rich, up-to-the-minute insight into application performance and availability," its Web site advertised. Perhaps more important, WatchMouse delivered its APM capability via a SaaS model.

More information is available on the company Web site.