Tony Baer
Compuware's Gomez acquisition expands definition of application performance management
Compuware recently acquired Internet performance management player Gomez in a $295 million deal. Compuware is not only expanding the reach of its application management business; it is redefining it to address what until now has been the missing piece: the Internet itself. The deal offers significant synergies if Compuware can master bringing together a classic example of Internet entrepreneurial culture with that of an established software firm.The Internet has been the black hole of application performance management Application performance management has always been one of the most fragmented management processes in IT: the development organization takes ownership over load testing, but IT operations monitors what happens at server, storage, and network device levels. IT operations cares about the physical characteristics of the load, but not necessarily what the load is. The program management office, if there is one, cares about performance as one aspect of managing the software portfolio.The closest thing to having the big picture on application performance is when a call comes into the service desk - then at least somebody knows that something is definitely wrong. Now factor in the Internet. While IT monitors the data center, the Internet to them is a black box. Vendors have addressed this gap with end-user monitoring that tracks the round trip from browser keystroke to app-server response and refresh of the client display. Such end-to-end analyses are fine if the problems are in the Java application or the browser. But if not, then the problem is outside IT's control.Keynote Systems, followed by Gomez, fill the breach. Both benchmark application performance on the net by using data centers and monitoring points across the globe. Both provide traffic and performance reports that distinguish by region and in some cases by ISP. Additionally, Gomez offers real user monitoring by recruiting 100,000+ users at homes and businesses, in 170 countries, providing actual performance data over the Internet's last mile. These services are typically ordered by the business, as in most cases they are utilized for consumer-oriented Internet services as opposed to internal applications.The result is that Internet application performance management is sliced and diced three ways: the software group tracks application service levels, IT operations monitors infrastructure, and the business and network operations groups monitor what goes out on the Internet, with the service desk being the first to know when performance tanks. It's a great recipe for finger pointing, and a great marketing riddle for vendors.The combination of Compuware and Gomez redefines application managementBy acquiring Gomez, Compuware sought to fill the last gap in performance management, redefining Internet application management by instrumenting the Internet itself.The deal is a coup for Compuware as it now has a capability not matched by any of its rivals, and the timing is auspicious given growing enterprise interest in use of the cloud, especially for SaaS-based applications.Compuware and Gomez have delivered a logical opening shot, providing display-level integration. Mutual customers with Vantage and the Gomez services (which is a SaaS offering) can get data from both products within the Gomez or Vantage screens. Gomez has also added an SNMP alerting service so that data can be fed to other IT infrastructure management tools.Compuware needs to bridge cultural gaps, both internally and with the customer There is good potential for cross-selling: for the Gomez base, effective web applications require an efficient back end; for the Vantage base, it's in extending application performance management to the Internet black box. At the portfolio level, there is an excellent opportunity to incorporate Internet performance to determine whether the application is fulfilling its business goal.But all have sold to different end markets: Gomez has often been brought in by sales and marketing groups, and consumed by the network operations group; Vantage has been more of a traditional enterprise IT sale to the software development and IT operations groups; Compuware's Changepoint PPM has targeted the program office. So for many accounts, there will be the need to cross-sell into different parts of the IT and network infrastructure organization. The other side of the coin is meshing two different vendor cultures: Compuware, a legacy vendor reinventing itself, and Gomez, a younger Internet upstart that went through reinvention five years ago.
