PainPoint = Effective Data Center Consolidation, Virtualization and Application Performance Management

There's a huge problem in the world of technology spending.

PainPoint = Internal politics that slows innovation and responsible for wasteful IT spending

With private clouds, SOA and Virtualization all the rage, we have to realize this is nothing drastically new here... insert new technology coupled with buzz word and great marketing, and funding shifts can sway towards and away from server teams, app teams, network teams... all of which remain siloed and fighting for their staff, or rather fighting for a larger chunk of the IT budget. Sadly, good engineers are often let go because of these politics, business suffers, and competitors gain an edge. The smartest organizations realize this is happening, and aim to form "Performance Teams" that offer a cross domain expertise, and discipline in deploying and monitoring the actual end user performance of new applications being deployed onto corporate IT networks. Unfortunately, you can't monitor effectively unless you can see the full picture across the network and into the servers. See my previous post about Google Chrome's "Speed Tests" about what does or does not constitute "End User Experience" http://painpoints.blogspot.com/2010/05/painpoint-ability-to-quickly-pinpoint.html

PainPoint = The ability to quickly pinpoint the root cause of poor Web Page Load Times

What is true is that Data Center consolidation, are here to stay, consolidations will continue, but as initial failures have occured, organizations will come to realize that critical applications can and will BREAK as you attempt to migrate them to private clouds and/or consolidate servers. In in this age of APM (Application Performance Management) and BTM (Business Transaction Management), truly revolutionary CIOs and Service Delivery Managers need to buy products that all 3 teams can use to monitor and troubleshoot your key business applications across the network, into the servers, and intelligently correlated with the running application code, while at the same time communicating to business owners about the "End User Experience."

PainPoint = Wasted hours or days Finger-Pointing between network, server and application teams. Results include but not limited to lower productivity and morale, longer mean time to respond to failures.

Cheer up!
Andy Fields
@PainPoint on Twitter
Feel free to add me as a connection on LinkedIN