Application Performance Management - Forrester Review Reveals What Nastel Offers   by Denise Rutledge

in    (submitted 2011-01-06)

Forrester, an independent research agency, recently interviewed Nastel Technologies about their application performance management software offering AutoPilot. The interview looked at four primary criteria: 1) Market factors; 2) Adoption factors; 3) Implementation factors; and 4) Company factors.

How did Nastel respond to questions on these four factors?

Application Performance Management - Market Factors
AutoPilot provides an application performance management solution that is applicable to a range of markets including: Financial services, healthcare, insurance and high-volume retail. It focuses on any industry where customer applications are mission critical, transaction volumes are heavy and/or messaging volumes are intensive. AutoPilot is designed to ensure that businesses meet their performance service level agreements (SLAs).

AutoPilot is mapped to meet the needs of midsize to large enterprises commonly recognized as Global 2000 companies. It has been successfully installed as the APM solution for both US and Canadian business. Successful installations have also been implemented across almost every European country, Israel and India.

Application Performance Management - Adoption Factors
The primary change many businesses experience after installing AutoPilot is the elimination of guesswork as to where mission critical issues are originating. Managers of the network aren't arguing with the managers of the database over who owns the problem. The APM solution has already identified where the problem originates. This reduces the number of full-time employees (FTEs) required to handle most issues to only one rather than multiple FTEs having to resolve an issue.

Adopting AutoPilot has also been proven to reduce the number of tickets produced by the service desk. Severity 1 issues fall significantly. This can be attributed to AutoPilot's complex event processing (CEP) based correlation and deep-dive capabilities. The visibility achieved through an AutoPilot installation reduces the issues that require tier 2 and tier 3 support.

Other benefits AutoPilot users have experience after installing the APM solution include: 1) Lower operational expenditures, 2) improved staff efficiency, 3) lower labor costs, 4) fewer and shorter outages, 5) lower capital expenditures, 6) improved compliance to SLAs among others.

Application Performance Management - Implementation Factors
The primary advantage offered by AutoPilot is its ability to integrate with the major ESM systems from IBM, HP, BMC and CA. AutoPilot's CEP-based platform harvests and analyzes events generated by these common systems. The results can be sent back to the originating program's dashboard or sent to AutoPilot's dynamic dashboard. This model enables businesses to continue to benefit from existing investments, even other APM solutions that may already be in use.

The greatest obstacle to implementation is usually organization. Many companies have a silo-based IT structure where separate specialists handle each discipline--net monitoring, servers, J2EE, etc. Encouraging ownership in the process is the first step to successful implementation. Nastel assigns one of its full-time employees to each deployment to assist with this process and to implement the next step.

Once this occurs, implementation usually takes place over two weeks, with the first day involving installation and the next two weeks ensuring the client is experiencing the full benefits the software offers. The prebuilt policies already support a wide range of platforms Windows, Unix, Linux, OpenVMS, Tandem, OS/400, zLinux, and z/OS. A wide range of adaptors are also available, so rapid deployment is the norm.

Nastel readily involves senior systems administrators in the process so configuration to specific environments is achieved as smoothly as possible. Within two weeks a single senior systems administrator can manage AutoPilot alone. By that time, the customer is already experiencing the business value of putting an application performance management solution into place.

Application Performance Management - Company Factors
The dependability of a company is a major factor in considering whether to choose an APM provider. Several factors are involved--experience of the management team, company financial stability and size, and unique ability to fill the customer's needs better than the competition.

Nastel began in 1994. The CEO and founder David Mavashev brought one of the first solutions for monitoring WMQ messages and transactions into the marketplace. Today the management team includes the original founder, a former CEO of InfoVista and a marketing and product manager with 28 years of experience in this field.

The company is privately funded through the revenues generated. It has remained profitable since its inception in 1994. It has less than 100 employees, meaning the company must provide excellent delivery and service in order to remain competitive.

Nastel has demonstrated its ability to deliver "Visibility, Prediction, & Performance” to Global 2000 companies while helping the companies it services accomplish the following: 1) Reduce their opex and capex costs for application monitoring, 2) lower their mean time to repair (MTTR), and 3) maximize their service while helping them remain compliant (thus reducing risk).

Nastel has accomplished these goals for their existing clients through a single application performance monitoring / business transaction management solution. AutoPilot covers deep operational and transactional real-time monitoring across both distributed and mainframe tiers. It utilizes a complex event processing platform that provides predictive analysis, and rules-based correlation and determination to evaluate business impact.

Nastel's ability to work with and/or compete with the four big giants has already been proven over the last 16 years. I&O decision makers should seriously consider contacting Nastel for more information.

About the Author

Denise Rutledge enjoys researching and writing about many topics including financial and business topics. Denise also works with clients to develop website content, with a focus on writing materials that develop brand and trust through valuable, easy to read information. Learn more by visiting her website at http://writingasaghost.com.