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

Hey Santa Claus, what’s happening man?

Well, it’s that time of year again where unfortunately I have to work. Gift orders are up 50% and my elves are working their socks off right now stocking my warehouses for the big day. I honestly don’t know how I would have coped without my new ElfOps team–they’ve been elastic and fantastic thanks to our new AWS hosted applications. The bad news is that my applications have processed record orders in 2011 so I’ll have to work harder. Frankly, this sucks.

Come again? Santa is using the cloud?

Isn’t everyone these days? I mean what else can I possibly do when my orders and subscriptions double each year? If Santa can’t scale, I spend my vacation reading angry letters from parents about how I made their kids cry and upset on Christmas Day. Forget that. I’d rather sit on a beach in Hawaii drinking Mojito’s catching a nice tan. In fact, I should be able to upgrade myself to the Four Seasons in Hawaii in 2012 due to the money I’ve saved by migrating to the cloud. You simply wouldn’t believe how much my own data center was costing me, not to mention those expensive IT Elf consultants I had to bring in. I’m now a lean mean parcel delivering machine and it’s all thanks to the cloud.

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Amazon EC2, apm, App Man, appdynamics, Application Performance, Big Data, CA Wily, cloud, Hadoop, Order Fallout, Santa

apm, APM Crusader, App Man, appdynamics, Application Performance Management Superhero, JavaOne, Visual Studio Live

I made my first public appearance last week at JavaOne and had a blast mixing it with the dev community and the various exhibitors. Prior to being bitten by radioactive byte code, I’d attended JavaOne as a developer and had fond memories of vast crowds, packed session rooms, and nonstop partying. While JavaOne ran in parallel to Oracle Open World again this year, the event actually felt independent despite San Francisco city being littered with Oracle posters. Walking into the venue every morning felt like it was still the biggest Java conference in the world, especially when you had corridors of developers checking email on bean bags. Java is very much alive, despite skeptics claiming its dead or has no future. If you had to write a new mission critical application for your business today, I’d expect the majority of organizations would still opt for Java despite the hype around other languages like Ruby, Python and the return of PHP.

I was attending JavaOne with AppDynamics as an exhibitor, and I’m pleased to report things went very well for us. What was surprising is that many attendees already knew who we were and what we did, and that wasn’t just from U.S. attendees. I spoke to lots of developers from Europe who were already using AppDynamics Lite and were keen to see a demo of our latest Pro edition.

We also met several attendees who were in the process of evaluating APM toolsets for their organizations. which was great. APM is definitely becoming a priority now for many application teams, with most struggling to get decent performance and visibility in production. I had one alarming conversation with an architect while he was briefing me on his team’s success criteria for selecting an APM solution. I heard the words “All the monitoring vendors tell me they run in production with a few percent overhead so I’ll take their word for it.” For me that’s like agreeing to a mortgage without asking each bank what their actual interest rates and terms & conditions are. My advice to this chap was along the lines of “trust no vendor and prove all overhead claims in production.” The reality today is very few APM vendors can run and scale in production–even though they all sound the same!

Speaking of APM vendors, both OpNet and Quest invited me over to their booth and asked if I’d mind having my photo taken with them. Being an APM superhero I was more than happy to accept their offer; it’s actually good to banter with competitors who have a sense of humor. I did try my best with the other APM vendor, but all the booth staff declined while staring at the floor–something about getting into trouble with their boss if they were seen with App Man. Maybe they were afraid of my X-Ray vision…

Here’s a brief photo diary of what I got up to at JavaOne:

Video Summary:

AppDynamics Customer TiVo stopped by to say Hello:

Grabbing a Coffee at Starbucks:

Meeting Dubu Panda from BMC:

Saying hello OpNet:

Saying hello to Quest:

Enjoying a Beer after a long day:

apm, App Man, Application Performance, Java, JavaOne, JavaOne11, OpNet, Oracle Open World, Quest

Ask any developer to name a few common performance bottlenecks and 99.9% of them will say “the database” as their first answer. Ask a DBA the same question and 99.9% of them will respond “crappy application code.” If we put aside the mutual love between each party, it’s actually worth looking at why they arrive at different conclusions.

First of all, it’s very easy to make any application or SQL query perform fast in a dev environment, especially on a developer’s desktop. Why? The two things that impact query performance are data volume and user/transaction concurrency, both of which typically don’t exist in dev environments when unit tests pass. Computing power these days is also silly fast and cheap with desktop cpu and memory helping any dev environment mask potential performance bottlenecks.

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App Man, Performance Bottleneck, Slow Database, slow SQL, Slow SQL Statement