Since the launch of our cloud-based application performance management (APM) solution, OpTier SaaS, in late April, we’ve received very positive feedback from our customers (not to mention analysts and prospects). In an earlier blog post this week, we even detailed some of the new functionality that OpTier SaaS now boasts.
Woohoo…we’re now among one of 10 companies that delivers a SaaS APM solution, just like we were one of 37 companies (per Gartner’s 2011 APM Magic Quadrant) that delivered an on-premise APM solution. What some analysts, investors, and even customers fail to realize is that having a SaaS offering isn’t the true source of value.
Granted, delivering technology solutions via SaaS does provide tremendous value; it lowers the cost, time of delivery and ultimately helps support a solution. You saw what a SaaS offering did to the 20-year service management industry when Servicenow.com launched, but at the end of the day, it’s still service management in its entire configuration item splendor!
The same holds true for SaaS APM industry. Today’s SaaS APM vendors have basically taken a technology solution that is more than a decade old and simply changed the delivery mechanism. All these companies have really done is delivered a 12 year old solution faster and cheaper. And, while there is nothing wrong with that, genuine and transformative innovation does not originate from a delivery mechanism (and the customers I’ve talked to recently seem to concur).
A JVM is a JVM. A method is a method. Does it really matter if I manage the performance of this in the cloud or not? It does to an extent, but going back to the service management example, tinkering with the delivery mechanism will not fundamentally add significant long term value, rather it will serve as a short term and incremental improvement to the original status quo.
So what’s different with OpTier? Where does our value come from? Both fair questions. The simple answer: business outcomes. I was chatting with the CIO of one of our larger enterprise customer last week and he repeatedly brought up the customer journey and truly having insight into his business outcomes. He wasn’t talking about all his JVM’s or if our solution was delivered via the cloud. He wanted our data to solve real business problems like customer churn, cost per transaction, revenue per transaction, etc. Using the APM transaction data we collect and applying our advanced analytics engine you can better understand the customer journey and how the application and infrastructure affects business outcomes. In other words, translating IT metrics into business meaning (i.e. value). Of course he was thrilled that we’re able to deliver this via the cloud, but the reason he’s taking my calls isn’t because I showed him a method running inside his JVM delivered via the cloud!
Real innovation and delivering value is more than updating the delivery mechanism of a technology that has been around for years, such as looking inside JVM’s at method level detail. This does not constitute transformative and game-changing innovation. Injecting analytics into the traditional APM technology to tie IT processes and functions to real-world business outcomes/value is what we deliver. And that’s exactly the kind of innovation our clients, and some of the biggest enterprises in the world, are interested in.
P.S. We can also show you JVM’s with some real cool methods too Image may be NSFW.
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