A new year, a new iPhone and a new quarter. What else is new? How about a new company?

Last month I was fortunate enough to join a stellar marketing team at one of the fastest growing enterprise software startups in the bay area. The company you ask? AppDynamics, and did I mention we’re also the leading next generation Application Performance Management (APM) provider for modern architectures in distributed, cloud, virtualized and on-premise environments? We exceeded our targets for 2011 achieving an astonishing 400% growth in bookings. Not too shabby for being the new kid on the block in a competitive market already inundated with vendors. You have old school APM tools from megavendors like CA, HP and Compuware (was dynaTrace). Then you have the new school breed such as New Relic and AppDynamics. In fact, Gartner’s MQ lists over twenty vendors. So with such a crowded market why did I even consider such a move?

Well there’s a laundry list of reasons, but here are the top ones that come to mind.

1. Business Innovation. This is another kind of BI not just Business Intelligence. It’s really a breath of fresh air to be working with an organization that is not only obsessed with pumping out insanely great technology every few quarters or so, but also open to embracing innovative approaches to every discipline of the business including creative marketing and sales strategies. Often times enterprise software companies unabashedly attempt to cloak themselves in slideware selling a “vision” or an enterprise solution poles apart from reality. Unfortunately when it comes down to an actual evaluation, you end up having to attend a dozen meetings just to see an applicable demo, a one week to two month proof-of-concept followed by throwing millions of dollars at consulting and implementation services, which segues to my next point.

2. Ease-of-Use. This simple yet powerful concept has been repeatedly neglected or intentionally ignored by many enterprise software companies. Luckily, the Leaders of the New School such as Apple, Salesforce, Box, etc. (not Busta Rhymes group) have changed the way end users value an intuitive user interface and design. At AppDynamics, we’ve adopted a similar mindshare. “Easy” is the new world order in this industry because the managers, engineers and folks in IT operations are encountering enough complexity as it is with these modern architectures. I doubt the last thing that they want is another tool to further complicate their lives causing more frustration on the job. At the end of the day everyone is a consumer – the least common denominator – who wants to use software that helps us demystify our lives and makes us successful at our jobs (unless you’re a sadist).

Software that is easy to install, implement and use can have a tremendous impact on the bottom-line of a business. Suppose you end up rolling out a new system but end up having to spend a chunk of company change on implementation and training costs. What impact does that have on your productivity and ultimately your company’s bottom-line? Here’s an example from Avon’s Q3, 2011 earnings transcript,

“Despite extensive pre-implementation testing, we had greater than anticipated implementation challenges in the go-live. Significantly higher business complexity in this market contributed to a greater than expected level of disruption, as I said, when we went to the go-live environment.”

Many vendors make enterprise deployments akin to embarking on an IT version of manifest destiny. I’m sure you can think of a few applications in your own IT toolbox that fit the bill where at some point you ended up asking yourself, “Why can’t this be as easy as [fill in the blank with some consumer app]?”  Fig. 2. See empathetic frustrated user to your left.

That was compelling enough for me to join AppDynamics. We truly understand the business significance as to why software ought to be easy 360 degrees around especially in production. I’m not saying that the work designers and developers have to do to achieve this “Easy” goal is easy in itself. I have an unrequited love for the folks in engineering who possess the talent and perseverance in coding applications, but that doesn’t excuse a vendor from selling you a dream and then leaving you stranded to implement a nightmare all because there wasn’t enough emphasis on ease-of-use.

3. Application Performance. This one is near and dear to my heart and arguably the main reason for me to join AppDynamics. It takes me back to the challenging days and sleepless nights I endured while working on a massive global PDM implementation at LG Electronics jointly with Dassault Systemes. The year was 2008. Skynet hadn’t become self-aware yet. App Man was just A Man in the throes and woes of IT operations, and half way around the world over in Seoul, Korea I was managing juggling recurring performance issues on a weekly basis with our PMO having to answer to the beck and call of the LGE CIO. The project’s launch date had been delayed due to various complications with the implementation (that’s a whole other story). Any ideas what one of those might have entailed? If you guessed “performance”, congratulations! You’ve won! Download your free copy AppDynamics Lite.

Every week new customizations were being released from R&D back in the states, PS in Korea and SI’s sitting on the other side of the room. You could call it Agile development’s nemesis, frAgile development. The dynamic nature of our java-based environment only introduced more challenges to the performance team who were heads-down trying to reverse engineer someone else’s code and refactor it using APM tools that just didn’t provide us with the full visibility we needed to comprehensively profile and diagnose application performance issues (using JenniferSoft). In fact, one of the consultants on our team ended up creating his own profiler to expose these blind spots, but what we really needed was a next-generation APM tool that would visually map and connect the dots for us like the one below.

Then we ran into another stumbling block after we completed migrating legacy data to a new “production” environment. When the time came to retest the entire set of performance use cases in this new environment we experienced all kinds of performance regressions. Since everyone was collaborating so well with each other for over the past two years, we all cheerfully marched forward without any finger pointing as to what the root cause was. Ok, so it wasn’t that utopian. Fortunately, because of everyone’s undying commitment and personal sacrifices, the project went live successfully in mid 2010 with over 2,000 users visiting the system per day. In hindsight, we could have easily saved a month’s worth had we used a better tool thereby eliminating the usual suspects.

From that experience I’ve come to appreciate and understand how business-critical managing application performance is for any company. Now I am on a mission to spread the word of AppDynamics to help companies manage rapidly evolving, distributed environments.

Buckle up 2012, we’re just getting started.

Agile Development, App Man, appdynamics, appdynamics lite, Application Performance, Application Performance Management, CA Wily, Compuware, Dynatrace, Ease-of-Use, HP, JenniferSoft, New Relic

appdynamics, CA Wily, Compuware, Dynatrace, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Nastel, New Relic, OpNet, OpTier, Oracle, Quest Software, Sh#! APM Vendors Say

Last week a performance engineer called Ben Bramley published a blog entitled “APM Market Disruptors – AppDynamics and New Relic“. The purpose of his article was to provide an overview of AppDynamics and New Relic, whilst also summarizing the key approaches each vendor/solution has taken to simplify and disrupt the APM marketplace.

Firstly, we’re thrilled to be recognized by a blogger, who in this case, had previous hands on experience with Application Performance Management (APM) products like OpTier, CA Wily, HP and dynaTrace. Secondly, whilst it was obviously good (and slightly nerving at times) to read our features and capabilities compared with another vendor (and the APM market in general), it was actually nice to see our freemium and SaaS based go-to-market strategy being recognized as well. I guess these things were actually the main reason why a blogger could access, compare and contrast two next generation APM solutions in the first place. It’s not like IBM, CA or Compuware would make their APM solution available to the masses for evaluation, let alone welcome an independent opinion.

You can read Ben’s blog article in full here.

App Man.

Update: HP does in fact offer their solution (HP Diagnostics v9) via trial, but you’ve got to download and install 4GB of their software.  In the time it takes to do this you could already be up and running with AppDynamics Lite.

APM Market Disruptors, AppDynamics vs New Relic, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, CA Wily, Dynatrace, HP, IBM, New Relic, OpTier, Web Monitoring

I have yet to meet anyone in Dev or Ops who likes alerts. I’ve also yet to meet anyone who was fast enough to acknowledge an alert, so they could prevent an application from slowing down or crashing. In the real world alerts just don’t work, nobody has the time or patience anymore, alerts are truly evil and no-one trusts them. The most efficient alert today is an angry end user phone call, because Dev and Ops physically hear and feel the pain of someone suffering

Why? There is little or no intelligence in how a monitoring solution determines what is normal or abnormal for application performance. Today, monitoring solutions are only as good as the users that configure them, which is bad news because humans make mistakes, configuration takes time, and time is something many of us have little of.

Its therefore no surprise to learn that behavioral learning and analytics are becoming key requirements for modern application performance monitoring (APM) solutions. In fact, Will Capelli from Gartner recently published a report on IT Operational Analytics and pattern based strategies in the data center. The report covered the role of Complex Event Processing (CEP), behavior learning engines (BLEs) and analytics as a means for monitoring solutions to deliver better intelligence and quality information to Dev and Ops. Rather than just collect, store and report data, monitoring solutions must now learn and make sense of the data they collect, thus enabling them to become smarter and deliver better intelligence back to their users.

Change is constant for applications and infrastructure thanks to agile cycles, therefore monitoring solutions must also change so they can adapt and stay relevant. For example, if the performance of a business transaction in an application is 2.5 secs one week, and that drops to 200ms the week after because of a development fix. 200ms should become the new performance baseline for that same transaction, otherwise the monitoring solution won’t learn or alert of any performance regression. If the end user experience of a business transaction goes from 2.5 secs to 200ms, then end user expectations change instantly, and users become used to an instant response. Monitoring solutions have to keep up with user expectations, otherwise IT will become blind to the one thing that impacts customer loyalty and experience the most.

Read the Full Post…

Analytics, apm, Application Diagnostics, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, Behavioral Learning, Business Transaction Management, Business Transactions, CEP, Complex Event Processing

AppDynamics has experienced significant growth over the past three years, here’s a quick summary of our key highlights.

Embed this image on your site:
<a href="http://www.appdynamics.com/blog/2012/01/20/appdynamics-growth/" title="AppDynamics Growth - Not Bad for 3 Years"><br /> <img src="http://www.appdynamics.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/AppDynamics_growth_infographic2.png" alt="AppDynamics Growth in 2011" /></a><br /> <br/>Source: <a href="http://www.appdynamics.com" title="AppDynamics Application Performance Management Tools">AppDynamics: Application Monitoring Company</a><br/>

apm, APm SaaS, APMaaS, appdynamics, AppDynamics Growth, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, Business Transaction Management

When I joined AppDynamics less than a year ago, we were situated in a 6,000 sq ft “cozy” office on 2nd and Brannan. On my first day I was greeted with a MacBook Pro and was asked to find a spare desk amongst the boxes and carnage of a typical startup environment. To my left was a relentless engineering and UI team, and to my right was a fired up sales and marketing team, and a quietly confident Founder and CEO, Jyoti Bansal who made all of this happen. Across the office was a shiny gold bell mounted on the wall, which rang every time AppDynamics closed a new customer. In the last year I can honestly say that shiny bell hasn’t stopped ringing, and is the biggest adrenaline boost one can get while working.

Read the Full Post…

apm, appdynamics, AppDynamics Funding, appdynamics lite, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, CA Wily, Compuware Dynatrace, Dynatrace, HP BAC, HP Diagnostics, IBM, Kleiner Perkins, New Relic

It’s been a great start to 2012 for us at AppDynamics. Last week, we were recognized by Forrester Research in their APM market overview, and at the end of 2011, Gartner included us in their report “APM Innovators: Driving APM Technology and Delivery Evolution” which was co-written by Will Capelli and Jonah Kowall.

According to Gartner’s report, APM is evolving into four key market requirements:

1. Complex and varied End Points

2. Cloud Services

3. Packaged Applications

4. Big Data

Read the Full Post…

APm SaaS, APMaaS, appdynamics, ATG, Big Data, Extrahop, Gartner APM, Gartner APM Innovators, Jonah Cowall, New Relic, Splunk, Will Capelli, Yantra

Forrester VP and Principal Analyst, JP Garbani, gives readers very pragmatic advice on the raison d’etre for APM.  Simply put, APM’s job is to:

1) Alert IT to application performance and availability issues before a full-scale outage occurs

2) Isolate or pinpoint the problem source

3) Provide deep-diagnostics to enable IT to determine the root cause

For several years now, JP Garbani has been on the forefront of proclaiming that modern APM solutions should enable IT organizations to manage apps not by gauging the heath of their servers or servlets, but instead by assessing what the customer or end-user cares about most – whether their Business Transaction completes quickly and doesn’t make them wait.  He states that this has become even more critical as applications have gotten more distributed and complex.

Read the Full Post…

apm, appdynamics, Application Performance Management, Application Performance Monitoring, CA Wily, Compuware, Dynatrace, Forrester APM, Forrester APM Market Overview, Nastel, New Relic, OpNet, OpTier, Precise

2011 was an amazing year for AppDynamics. We experienced tremendous growth and success, largely down to the many customers around the world who believed in our vision, technology, and ability to help Dev and Ops teams better manage application performance in production. The Application Performance Management (APM) market isn’t an easy market to succeed in, with well over 30 vendors competing against each other. In just three years we’ve managed to take on the big players like Compuware DynaTrace, CA Wily, HP and IBM to change the industry perception that APM is expensive to own and difficult to deploy/use.

We feel APM should be for everyone. It should be affordable, it should be easy to deploy, and easy to use. APM should not be a luxury that only an elite group of enterprises can afford. Today, we have customers who monitor applications with 5 nodes, 50 nodes, 500 nodes and 5,000 nodes. Application performance impacts organizations of all sizes; that’s why we wanted our APM solution to be accessible to the masses over the web via our free download and SaaS trial. We wanted to be transparent with our buyers and demonstrate that they can evaluate and use our solution all by themselves with no account manager or technical consultant by their side. We really wanted prospects to see for themselves that APM can be simple to deploy and easy to use.

A major validation of this market disruption was when a customer called Karavel in France was looking for an APM solution and evaluated CA Wily, Compuware dynaTrace and AppDynamics. Karavel requested a trial, downloaded our software and we sent them a trial license key for 30 days. The whole AppDynamics install, deployment and evaluation was solely conducted by the customer on their own. This might not sound that impressive, but this is what the software buying experience should be all about: the customer and the solution. If the customer can’t install, deploy and evaluate an APM solution on their own, how will they manage this process when it comes to a production deployment? Software should sell itself these days–if it requires an army of people to sell it, it probably requires an army of people to implement it as well.

You can read the full Karavel press release here:
http://www.appdynamics.com/press/press-release-01-03-12.php

Full case study is available here also:
http://www.appdynamics.com/documents/case_studies/AppDynamics_CS_Karavel.pdf

Remember, software like APM doesn’t have to be complex and expensive. With the internet these days, there is no excuse why a prospect can’t download or evaluate solutions online in just a few hours.

App Man.

apm, appdynamics, application monitoring, Application Performance Management, CA Wily, Compuware, Dynatrace, HP BAC, IBM ITCAM, New Relic, OpNet, OpTier, Quest Foglight

Embed this image on your site:
<a href="http://www.appdynamics.com/blog/2011/12/20/the-12-days-of-devops" title="AppDynamics Application Performance Management"><br /> <img src="http://www.appdynamics.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/12_days_of_devops1.png" alt="12 Days of DevOps" /></a><br /> <br/>Source: <a href="http://www.appdynamics.com" title="AppDynamics Application Performance Management Tools">AppDynamics: Application Monitoring Company</a><br/>

Agile & DevOps, apm, Application Performance Management, DevOps, Web Operations, WebOps