Application delays are bad news for productivity, morale and
customer loyalty. How bad? Consider these findings from a survey
released Tuesday by Symantec Corp.: 86% of employees say
application performancelatency lowers morale; 93% of business
users say it affects their productivity; 86% of online shoppers say
frequent delays in transactions erode their loyalty to the company,
and 18% say online delays would cause them to switch to a
competitor or give up on the transaction.
But the bigger and baddest news is for CIOs: Nearly one-quarter
of IT staff time, 24%, is spent addressing business application
delays, according to the survey. The independent survey was
conducted in July for Symantec by Applied Research, a market
research firm. The survey polled 600 IT managers, business users
and consumers of global 1,000 organizations in North America.
"Qualitatively, we heard a lot of information from our customers
about the time they spent solving application delay problems, but
we wanted a more quantitative view," said Henri Isenberg, vice
president, server foundation and APM product group at Symantec
Corp. "Our thought was OK, maybe it's 5% or 10% of their time, as a
high number, but 24% is astounding."
Astounding, maybe, but certainly a nice data point for the
Cupertino, Calif.-based software company's reporting and alerting
tool, i3. Symantec's i3 solution product, which sells for $1,500
per CPU, provides a "proactive, end-to-end approach to application
performance management" by identifying and correcting problems
"before they affect the application user's experience," according
to company materials.
Much of the time fixing application latency problems is spent on
isolating the root cause of the slowdown, Isenberg said. One reason
it takes so long to pinpoint the problem, he posits, is that many
IT departments operate in silos. Storage, database, network,
middleware, Web server, desktop and help desk functions are masters
of their own domains. Application delays cut across all those
groups.
"Typically when there is a performance problem, the first thing
that happens is the blame game, or what we call 'blamestorming.'
Literally every silo points a finger at the other," Isenberg
said.
Take the example of the Symantec customer with a Web application
that included a pull-down with a list of options. When users
clicked on the pull-down, they were waiting for up to a minute for
the pull-down to pop up -- not a good thing for business when
nearly 20% of customers say they will abandon a slow site or switch
to the competition.
The blame for the slowpoke menu went immediately to the people
who ran the Web application, Isenberg said. "They claimed no; they
were running a simple request of the list from the database. The
database folks said, 'No, the database is working fine.' When they
installed Symantec i3 and ran it across this multi-tier
application, they discovered that every time there was a request
for that table from the database, the database was re-indexing that
table," he said, The company could have been digging for weeks for
what i3 found in two minutes.
Zeus Kerrazala, vice president of enterprise research at
Boston-based The Yankee Group, agreed that getting to the root
cause is critical. "If you're an IT manager, the majority of time
in problem solving is spent in trying to identify where the problem
is. A product like i3 can help with that," he said.
There are many ways to solve application performance problems,
and plenty of vendors play in the area of application performance
management, Kerrazala said. A Yankee Group survey performed last
year found that 16% of employee productivity loss was related to
application slowdowns.
"You have products from Cisco or Riverbed [Technology Inc.] that
actually make modifications or automatically tune the network to
prevent applications from performing poorly," Kerrazala said.
Symantec i3 is an application version of what HP's OpenView or
EMC's Smarts might do for networks.
In his view, inconsistent application performance is even more
deadly to productivity and morale than slowdowns. Even poor
application performance, provided it is consistently poor, is
preferable.
"There's nothing that frustrates users more than flaky
applications," said Kerrazala, adding that CIOs who ignore
application performance do so at their own peril. "I guess if
you're looking for a quick termination, doing nothing would do
it."
Let us know what you think about the story; email:
Linda Tucci, Senior News
Writer