Application Performance Management Is Critical When Moving To The Cloud

Demand for application performance management is growing when moving applications to the cloud, according to a recent survey.

Key areas were surveyed to better understand plans for consolidation and virtualization; which applications would be cloud-enabled; attitudes toward using WAN optimization or APM solutions and service level agreements (SLAs) requirements.

The majority of MNC respondents indicate that Web conferencing, video conferencing and Microsoft applications are the most likely applications to be virtualized or cloud-enabled. Only 95 of the 500 companies plan to virtualize their call center applications and even fewer plan to virtualize customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, human resources, or other applications. The selection of applications for the cloud is based on those that are used "off-the-shelf" versus those that are typically customized for unique business use.

The study shows most companies, 67.6 percent, plan to consolidate data centers and servers within the next two years, further validating that consolidation continues to be driven by cost reduction and centralization.

European multinationals' use of WAN optimization or an application delivery performance solution is mixed. Though 54.4 percent already have a solution in place, 45.6 percent indicate that they still do not currently use WAN optimization or an application delivery performance solution. With new access technologies and bandwidth costs varying by region, performance can be achieved without any solution. However, economic challenges continue to compel bandwidth savings and cost reduction as key drivers for MNCs knowing that bandwidth will not resolve application-specific protocol issues and guarantee end-user experience.

When asked about service level agreements (SLAs), 69.1 percent expect to have application-level SLAs such as application availability, while 55.9 percent expect managed network services SLAs such as round trip delay, packet loss and jitter.

Comment from Jean Critcher, Solution Director at Orange Business Services: As this study shows, WAN optimization and APM continue to be important to MNCs and most especially when they are moving to the cloud. As a continuance to achieve the fastest means to cost reduction, these solutions become more justified. Our customers who use WAN optimization and APM solutions from Orange benefit from double-digit savings to TCO and improvements to productivity while seeing ROI within a year.

About the survey: Orange Business Services assessed application performance management (APM) plans and attitudes among decision makers from 500 multinational corporations (MNC) in 12 European countries(1) across various industry sectors including financial services, health care, manufacturing, retail and transportation. The complete survey results are available online in a report titled "Application Performance Management: maintaining performance, productivity and getting ready for the cloud."

Contact: http://www.orange.com