Enterprise

Digital Transformation, Code Halos, Analytics and Mobility

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 14:02:46 EDT

A retailers' mantra throughout history has been location, location location. This is always important, but perhaps of less value than other innovations caused by digital transformations today. The ongoing digital transformation of many industries has created new competitive playing fields that are increasingly related to data. The winners are those that can more quickly collect, analyze, report, make data driven decisions and capture value from the data. The data that surrounds customers, partners, companies and individuals is called "code halosTM" by my colleagues at the Center for the Future of Work in their new whitepaper Code Rules. It is their analysis that companies that understand and manage code halos most effectively will be the winners in their industries. Let me paint two scenes for you.

Application Power Consumption Is the Mobile IT Factor

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 13:00:00 EDT

Back in the good old 1990s we were actually concerned with software application performance factors such as processing power clock speed along with system memory and storage. While memory is still an important determining factor, the questions of microprocessor megahertz and total system storage capacity have become largely regarded as “sufficiently catered for” in almost any given desktop computer system. But as mobile form factors have joined their desktop-based cousins, new conditional dynamics have come to the fore. Suddenly processor speed is once again a consideration, as is memory, screen size, input mechanism (i.e., touch, stylus, speech, etc.) and perhaps most of all power consumption.

The Dangers of Dumbing Down Your Business

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 12:15:00 EDT

In Part 1 I talked about how there’s nothing new about subscription services since they’ve been around for generations. Now I’ll relent a little and admit that there is something new about many of the subscription services out there. What’s new is what is no longer there. Traditionally, the whole point of subscription services was to create a two-way commitment in which both the service provider and the customer benefits. The commitment benefits the customer by providing discounts, rewards, exclusive products, price stability and service guaranteed in return for a promise to pay money regularly for a period of time. The commitment benefits the service provider by establishing a more predictable and reliable forecast of revenues for some time into the future, which facilitates both resource planning and financial planning.

Part 5 | Five Steps to Improve E-Commerce Performance for Increased Sales

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 12:15:00 EDT

Our client TescaraHats (name changed for commercial reasons), a European market leader in manufacturing customized hats, decided to expand its market reach with an e-commerce site where its potential customers could choose, customize and order hats online. TescaraHats used an APM tool to fix a number of e-commerce application performance and usability issues we presented in this mini-series. But there was still a missing link that would ensure TescaraHats increased sales. I guess you thought we forgot about the conversion rate? Nope, here is how an application performance management (APM) tool can tell you why it is so low.

Make PHP Requests “Sleep” to Stop Bad Behavior. Smart or Not?

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 12:13:00 EDT

In a previous post we showed how we hooked up our blog’s WordPress application with the new Compuware APMaaS offering. Since WordPress is a PHP application we use PurePath for PHP to monitor it. We highlighted that we got an alert about a response time violation on some of our blog posts. In this follow-up article I want to show you how we get to the root cause of this problem which turns out to be a third-party WordPress PHP plugin that detects Bad Requests including requests from Bots that try to put spam messages in blog comments.

What Does Research Say Is the Competitive Advantage of Data?

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:30:00 EDT

The explosion of mobile devices, e-commerce and "The Internet of Things" is introducing massive amounts of new data into our ecosystem. Some companies ignore this data for all but the most tactical explorations, but others are revolutionizing entire industries by recognizing the value of this data and taking advantage of it. My colleague, Ben Pring, has been conducting a lot of research this year on the impact of business analytics, big data and other fast emerging business strategies on a company's ability to compete. In this guest post Ben shares his latest findings. What one key characteristic separates today's high-flying outperformers - such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix and Pandora - from fast-followers, wannabes, and laggards? It's a precision focus on the information that surrounds people, organizations, products and processes - what we call Code Halos TM - to build new business and commercial models. These leading companies have realized that the data - or Code Halo - that accompanies people, organizations and devices contains a richness of business insight that far outstrips the value of physical assets that have historically underpinned market leadership. Conversely, companies that have missed or misunderstood the Code Halo phenomena are now struggling to cope in markets that are moving at warp speed; some, in fact, have already succumbed.

Five Big Data Features in Oracle

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:11:12 EDT

Over the past two decades relational databases have been most successful in serving large scale OLTP and OLAP applications across enterprises. However, in the past couple of years with the advent of Big Data, processing especially processing unstructured data coupled with the need for processing massive quantities of data, made the industry to look into non RDBMS solutions. This has led to the popularity of NOSQL databases as well as massively parallel processing frameworks. However, the traditional RDBMS have been quick to react and added several Big Data features as part of their offering so that enterprises with a heavy investment in traditional RDBMS can have the best of both worlds by properly leveraging these new features.

What CIOs Need to Know Today About SDN

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:28:00 EDT

SDN is a new, dynamic network architecture that transforms traditional network backbones into more intelligent service-delivery platforms. IT leaders can use SDN as a tool to change the way they do business. For example, enterprises can foster closer relationships with their customers by offering greater online access to select data over the enterprise network. A financial services firm can give large corporate customers the opportunity for third-party reporting, governance, or even allow analytics firms to directly access enterprise credit card transactions, obviating the need for intermediate sites and cumbersome manual process steps that are needed to provide sufficient multi-level security. An SDN would create virtual network partitions governed by stringent and limited access policies, and security to decrease unauthorized access.

Big Data OLTP with IBM DB2 BLU and DB2 pureScale

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:15:00 EDT

Big Data as we know it today is more aligned to the analytical processing of large quantities of data. All the predominant use cases identified by the big data product vendors are more aligned with analytical processing. For example one of the major use case of Big Data is about utilizing social media data to get into advertisement targeting. Naturally these kind of processing analyzing lot of unstructured data and come up with predictions on customer preferences and this use case is aligned with analytical processing. To support these kinds of analytical processing Columnar databases have emerged as a natural extension to Big Data processing. Columnar databases only reads columns involved in the query and not the entire row and making it a perfect fit for analytical processing.

Eating Our Own Dog Food – 2x Faster Hadoop MapReduce Jobs

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:15:00 EDT

For a while now I have been writing about how to analyze and optimize Hadoop jobs beyond just tweaking MapReduce options. The other day I took a look at some of our Outage Analyzer Hadoop jobs and put words into action. A simple analysis of the Outage Analyzer jobs with Compuware APM 5.5 identified three hotspots and two potential Hadoop problems in one of our biggest jobs. It took the responsible developer a couple of hours to fix it and the result is a 2x improvement overall and a 6x improvement on the Reduce part of the job. Let’s see how we achieved that.

Getting a Grip on Big Data

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 09:51:46 EDT

HP has made a big announcement around a broader vision for businesses to help them gain actionable intelligence from literally a universe of potential sources and data types. Fairly recently, only critical data was given this high-falutin' treatment for analysis, warehousing, applying business intelligence (BI) tools, making sure that it was backed up and treated almost as if it were a cherished child. But almost overnight, the savvy businesses, those who are looking for business results, are more interested in all the data of any kind so that they can run their businesses better, and find insights in the areas that they maybe didn’t understand or didn’t even know about. So what do you think has happened? Why have we moved from this BI-as-sacred ivory tower approach to now more pedestrian?

To Future Proof or Not, That Is the Question

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 09:28:00 EDT

"To be or not to be" is the famous opening phrase of Hamlet’s well-known soliloquy in Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet.” In the soliloquy, Hamlet questions the meaning of life, and whether or not it is worthwhile to stay alive when life contains so many risks and hardships. He concludes that the primary reason people stay alive is due to a fear of death and the uncertainty of what lies beyond. Now what does this passage in Hamlet have to do with future proofing a business or monetization? Many organizations grapple with unknowns as well. “Do I just focus on the now and not worry about the future? Change is scary; risk is even scarier, so I can’t be bothered thinking about the future.” For many, the future never comes as the decisions made in the present impact their ability to define their future. Instead their business is defined very precisely for them by what a billing system can deliver in the present. What seemed like a non-risk suddenly becomes life or death for the business.

When the Software Fails, First Blame the Hardware

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:45:00 EDT

Glitches in important IT systems — like NatWest and Google Drive — can no longer be “the cost of doing business” in this day and age. Interestingly, we're starting to see another concerning trend: more and more crashes blamed on faulty hardware or network problems, while the software itself is ignored. It's funny that the difference in incidents can be more than 10 times between applications with similar functional characteristics. Is it possible that the robustness of the software inside the applications has something to do with apparent hardware failures? I think I see a frustrated data center operator reading this and nodding violently. The business has this perception that the guys running the databases, the server racks, and the private cloud are 100 percent sure they know exactly what's running on their servers. In reality, they get a woefully incomplete view of how the system works. At every release, the data center gets a fresh load of executables from the software builds. These may be transactional applications, web services, or batch jobs that get dropped on various servers. In either case, it's impossible to take a look inside an executable. It's doubly impossible to know how different executables will interact with the CPU, the network, or each other.

Part 4 | Five Steps to Improve E-Commerce Performance for Increased Sales

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 14:00:00 EDT

Our client TescaraHats (name changed for commercial reasons), a European market leader in manufacturing customized hats, set up an e-commerce site in hopes of increasing its market share and boost its sales. This did not happen. TescaraHats learned quickly that there is much more to e-commerce performance than simply putting an e-commerce service online. In Parts 1–3 of our e-commerce performance mini-series we discussed why focusing on page rank is not enough and that we should look at your performance at the back end and potential network-related problems. In Part 4 we will see what happens when your customers come to your e-commerce site.

How to Recruit the Next Generation of Load and Performance Testers

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:45:00 EDT

Last month, I went to my engineering school, where I graduated 15 years ago, to attend the Annual Gala. While there, I met a few young engineers who asked about my job. This raised a question: “What would make them join my team?” In the IT world, the demand for highly skilled software engineers continues to grow as application development becomes an integral part of more and more businesses around the globe. As more and more applications are highly connected and have strong SLAs and are addressing sensitive business issues, the demand for load and performance testers also grows. Companies have been using creative techniques like using Big Data, Twitter and gamification to find top tech talent, but how do you get talented young engineers to 1) be interested in load testing and 2) want to work at your company in your team?

Profiling Python Performance Using lineprof, statprof, and cProfile

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 16:25:00 EDT

If you’re a regular here, you know how much we care about the full-stack view of applications. Today, let’s zoom in a bit, and talk about the performance of a single layer. In particular, let’s look at profiling in Python. As an example, let’s take this bit of code for calculating confidence intervals of the mean of a set of data. If you’re not familiar with confidence intervals, they provide a set of bounds for a given statistic; a 95% interval implies that the true mean lies in the calculated range 95% of the time. One way of calculating this involves generating a number of new data sets from the data you have (random selection, with replacement), and looking at that (meta?-)data set. In practice, you typically run this a couple of times, look at the results, and see if they’re converging. If not, you keep running until they do converge, or you hit some max number of iterations.

Big Data, IoT, API – Newer Technologies Protected by Older Security

Fri, 31 May 2013 08:15:00 EDT

Nowadays every single CIO, CTO, or business executive that I speak to is captivated by these three new technologies: Big Data, API management and IoTs (Internet of Things). Every single organizational executive that I speak with confirms that they either have current projects that are actively using these technologies, or they are in the planning stages and are about to embark on the mission soon. Though the underlying need and purpose served are unique to each of these technologies, they all have one thing common: they all necessitate newer security models and security tools to serve any organization well. I will explain that in a bit, but let us see what is the value added by these technologies to any organization.

From Phones, to Data Centers, to Cars and Arenas: Ethernet Is Everywhere!

Tue, 28 May 2013 08:30:00 EDT

On May 22, Ethernet – Robert Metcalfe’s ingenious invention –celebrated its 40th anniversary. As the global tech community celebrates this milestone for one of the world’s most transformative technologies, we take a look at its evolution from a printer-to-printer communication system at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), to a system that is underpinning everything from how we access and leverage data to how we drive our cars. From its origins at Xerox, over the last 40 years Ethernet has become the quintessential and standard network solution for an increasingly diverse array of applications. Highly scalable and adaptable, in recent years Ethernet has evolved from its enterprise roots, infiltrating today’s high performance data centers and Metro network rings at 10 GbE speeds and now 40 and 100 GbE speeds, offering predictable performance with quality of service, improved latency and seamless access to a wide array of applications and services.

How Internet Outages Can Affect Your Application

Mon, 27 May 2013 14:00:00 EDT

Complexity is the new reality of web and mobile applications with almost no new release going out without the addition of services and applications spread across many different companies. But the reality of this new interrelationship is still the same: If a third-party Internet outage or issue occurs, your brand is the one that is affected. With up to 1,500 distinct third-party services available to choose from around the world, it is sometimes difficult to even identify what a service does when it appears in your applications. This forces your team to not only be fully aware of the components you control, but also to be able to follow the trail of services that extends far outside the code and systems your company manages when issues appear.

Five Steps to Improve E-Commerce Performance for Increased Sales

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:00:00 EDT

The saying “if it doesn’t exist on the Internet, it doesn’t exist”[1] is ringing truer every day. Nowadays, it is hard to imagine most businesses without an e-commerce platform, let alone without a web presence at all. Since e-commerce is becoming the new standard, e-commerce performance needs to be at its best. In this blog series, I have come up with several ways to ensure your company’s e-commerce performance success, including: avoiding unnecessary network load,reducing number of (internal) HTTP errors, improving backend performance,understanding your clients, ensuring scalability of e-commerce site and finally understanding sales results through conversion rate. Our client TescaraHats (name changed for commercial reasons), a European market leader in manufacturing customized hats, decided to expand its market reach with an e-commerce site where its potential customers could choose, customize and order hats online. Since the company’s core competence is in delivering highly customized products, TescaraHats could not simply use an off-the-shelf e-commerce application. It needs a customization wizard so that customers can create a uniquely customized product.

Book Review: The Modern Web

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:44:06 EDT

Although I started with ColdFusion for application development, I did plenty brochureware sites with HTML. I believe the version was HTML 2.0 for IE 2.0. I lived in the browser world for years doing ColdFusion, ASP, and HTML sites. When winforms and Smart Client with web services emerged I changed my religion. Since then I have been avoiding the browser whenever possible since. For the past couple of years I have used HTML/JavaScript/CSS a lot as a byproduct of building ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC applications for public consumption. Internal enterprise applications I will still push for using WPF and web services over ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC, but I lose that battle a lot, especially when the developers have never learned WPF (XAML) and have no interest in learning anything new. When it comes to Mobile Apps my first choice will always be native applications using Objective-C, XAML with C# or C++, and Java using the ASP.NET Web API for the services. The problem is I am going to end up fighting the same battle with the web developers that don't like learning anything new. They are going to turn to HTML/JavaScript/CSS to build their mobile applications as a mobile web site or hybrid application.

Part 2 | Understand the Impact of IT on Business

Sat, 18 May 2013 11:00:00 EDT

Part 2 of a two part blog series looking at the journey enterprise IT departments take as they increasingly seek to understand the relationships and impact of IT infrastructure performance on application performance and business services. Through observation, Fred notices that even though his alarms, based on dynamic baselines, catch problems in his environment, they’re also catching busy days, quiet days, and even slightly odd days. He starts to realize that just looking at the level of metrics is necessary, but not sufficient. Fred also needs to look at how the metrics work together – he needs statistical correlation.

BYOx: Incorporating More than Just User Devices

Thu, 16 May 2013 14:00:00 EDT

The last few years in IT have seen us move from a proactive to a reactive environment. For decades, the boundaries in communication technology were pushed by government, military and business needs. As technology improved and costs dropped, innovations were gradually adapted for the consumer market. But this is not the case anymore. IT is now in the position of having to rapidly adopt new hardware and software to keep up with evolving business needs. This time the pressure is coming from their own employees, as consumer trends make their way to the world of business. Chief among these developments is mobility. More than just a single trend, however, it is fundamentally changing the way we work in a variety of ways. Employees are finding that smartphones and tablets give them the freedom to be productive anywhere. While initially the company was in complete control of the purchase, provisioning and life cycle of these devices, in recent years, employees have begun demanding the freedom to use their own devices for work as well.

Monitoring Background Jobs in Ruby’s Resque

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:45:00 EDT

Here at AppNeta, we get to see a lot about how people build their web applications. From simple PHP scripts to heavily service-oriented Java clouds to monolithic Django apps, everybody’s product is architected a little differently. We’re still out to trace everything, and today I want to talk how to get visibility into an important component of any complex system: the messaging queue. Specifically, let’s look at how to trace a job from Rails using Resque.

Just How Far Could Big Data Drive Us?

Mon, 13 May 2013 11:00:00 EDT

We have all been getting used to the term Big Data by now. Despite varying definitions of what it is supposed to mean across a variety of computing platforms and use cases, we typically understand Big Data to refer to anything from “hundreds” of gigabytes for smaller organizations through to what might be quintillions of bytes running on “massively parallel” software in big enterprises. Where we see one of Big Data’s most pertinent instances in 2013 is in the subject of connected cars and data-enabled automotive technologies in general. As an element of the so-called Internet of Things, connected car technology sits alongside data being created from all manner of “systems with sensors” that encompasses everything from wide-scale traffic management systems through to surveillance cameras, and even home refrigerators and televisions.

Change Management Is Redundant Without Configuration Management

Mon, 13 May 2013 09:00:00 EDT

The first law of change management is not to use change management. To be more precise, the first law of change management is not to use change management until you use configuration management first. Okay so that might be a slightly sneaky way of making a point, but many change management vendors will primarily label their software as an SCCM tool, i.e., Software Configuration and Change Management. There is a good reason why these two disciplines are stated in that order; you should never change until you configure (and analyze) so that you know what you have in the first place.

Renegade Business Execs, SMAC and Things Are Out of Control

Fri, 10 May 2013 14:45:00 EDT

This morning Cognizant, the company where I work as an analyst, reported their earnings. In the earnings call Cognizant CEO Francisco D'Souza stated, "This year we expect to deliver about $500 million in SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, cloud) related services." That is a significant number in Boise, Idaho where I live. I study SMAC related topics daily and teach SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) workshops globally. No one is arguing against these mega-trends in 2013. The questions I get are related to how to embrace and exploit these trends for the good of the company given their unique position, market, industry and region. On another topic - I read an article today titled, "Renegade Business Execs Drive IT Strategy" that I found intriguing. Here is an excerpt, "Business executives are increasingly bypassing the IT department and spending their own budgets on technology as "it's too important for their business to leave to IT", says analyst house Forrester."

Part 1 | Understanding the Impact of IT on Business

Fri, 10 May 2013 11:00:00 EDT

Part 1 – of a two part series looking at the journey enterprise IT departments take as they increasingly seek to understand the relationships and impact of IT infrastructure performance on application performance and business services. As a product manager at Netuitive, I’m often put in a position to explain how my product works. This question usually refers not just to the nuts and bolts of the technology, but also to the more specific question: “How do I make it work?” To get to the heart of the answer, you need to understand the underpinnings of today’s monitoring solutions and why most of them don’t represent a complete solution. To help illustrate this, I’ll look at the problem from the perspective of Fred, an operations manager for “Acmecorp.” Fred is responsible for keeping Acmecorp’s key E-Commerce platform, BuyThis.com, up and performing under stringent 24x7 SLAs.

How to Successfully Build a Bootstrapping Software Business

Thu, 09 May 2013 11:00:00 EDT

Every young software business is different. Yet regardless of niche, competitive pressures or economic conditions, all startups face the same key issues. It’s possible to survive those hectic, early years as a bootstrapped business – even thrive during them. All you need is… 1) An idea for a software product that is needed on the market or a product that has passed its first function tests with flying colors. In other words, the market requires products that are great right from the start or that promise greatness. This leads right into 2) out into the world. In order to put the product onto the digital sales counter, you need an informative website with a web shop. It’s often a good idea to outsource the online shop to an external provider for the starting phase, and let them take care of sales in exchange for a low service cost. The benefits are obvious: you don’t have to bother with the details of billing, European (or other) value-added tax rules, returns or charging credit cards. Instead, you receive a monthly invoice detailing each transaction. This gives you the freedom to concentrate on your core task – product development.

Big Data and Mobility Change the Way We Live

Thu, 09 May 2013 10:30:00 EDT

This week I read an interesting article titled, Mobile Phone Data Redraws Bus Routes in Africa. Seems the MNO (mobile network operator) Orange released 2.5 billion phone records (anonymised data) from 5 million phones for an exercise on how Big Data could be used to improve lives. The data was used by IBM's research laboratory in Dublin to determine how people could reduce travel times in the city of Abidjan, Ivory Coast. They compared the locations of actual mobile phone usage with current bus routes, and then developed a plan to change the bus routes to more efficiently serve the actual locations of where people lived. They reported there could be a 10% reduction in travel times by following their plan. This is very interesting to me. Instead of guessing how people live, travel and use their mobile phones - big data reports the facts. If you combine telco data with actual public transportation data and other sources you can learn an immense amount about the world we live in, and thus how we can improve it.

Enterprise and Consumer Mobility and Travel Strategies

Thu, 09 May 2013 09:00:00 EDT

I teach a lot of SMAC strategies workshops (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) around the world. Conducting these involves a lot of travel. I have been pondering these last few days just how much my travel experience has changed over the past decade. I could continue. I research and write about technologies that cause digital disruptions. All of the above mobile app capabilities are in some manner disrupting the way the travel and hospitality industry operate. There are digital disruptions happening in every industry today - some are small, but others are massive. I make decisions on the hotels I book based upon their quality and comfort, and their high speed internet connections. I don't care how nice a hotel is, if it can't get me on the Internet at a decent speed I will not stay there. That kind of behavior is a digital disruptor for hotels.

Are You Acting Strategically Enough with Your Enterprise Mobility?

Wed, 08 May 2013 16:10:08 EDT

I read the following question recently, "Are we acting strategically enough to matter?" I remember the question, because I believe it is so important for us all to answer. It is a question all IT and business people should be asking themselves! In this picture of charging elephants, would it really make a difference if you took a baby step to the left, right, forward or backwards? Probably not! The only way to save yourself would be to do something strategic and fast! I see enterprise mobility in a similar way. How long are large enterprises going to engage in tiny proof of concepts before they do something big! The mega-trends of SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) are not going away. The faster companies recognize these are absolutely market and industry altering trends and begin to do something smart about it, the better.

How Big Data Is Disrupting the Tech Hiring Process for Startups

Mon, 06 May 2013 11:00:00 EDT

Talent recruiting is undergoing a major shift with the introduction of Big Data, turning a traditional industry on its head. Previously, recruiting was primarily conducted through open directories like Monster.com, where candidates were spammed according to keyword matches. Then the job market got more competitive – for those doing the hiring. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, the web industry ballooned. In addition to a handful of large, traditional technology companies, there was suddenly a plethora of small businesses building web tools and services. The demand for talent to match this industry growth has created a large imbalance in hiring: there simply aren't enough developers or designers to fill these positions. Today, often the only way for a startup to land a good developer is to poach or import them.

Let’s Talk About Your Performance

Sun, 05 May 2013 15:00:00 EDT

Back in the misty eons of time, it used to be easy to measure the performance of your application. You’d grab a stopwatch, load up your web application, and see what happend. If it was slow, you’d look at the mess of PHP, HTML and CSS you crammed into index.php and make sure that you weren’t using bubble sort anywhere. In these modern times, you typically take a few more extra steps: Add Varnish to cache any generated content Split your MySQL InnoDB tables into separate files Add another Memcached server Tune the buffer size on your Cassandra/Mongo/Couch reads Create and/or delete a few indexes in your SQL DB

Balancing the Load

Sun, 05 May 2013 10:00:00 EDT

A question that every online application provider will face eventually is: Does my application scale? Can I add an extra 100 users and still ensure the same user experience? If the application architecture is properly designed the easiest way is to put an additional server behind the load balancer to handle more traffic. In this article we recount an incident that happened to one of our clients when the cause of poor application performance was eventually attributed to problems with the load balancing of the application servers. Around 8 am the Operations team at Rendoosia Inc. (name changed for commercial reasons) got an alert from the APM tool that one of three SharePoint servers was generating many HTTP Server (500) errors. All three servers were behind a load balancer; hence why the team decided to analyze the overall performance of all three servers with the report presented in Figure 1.

Load Testing: Same Old, Same Old or a Whole New Ball Game?

Fri, 03 May 2013 13:00:00 EDT

I started my career as a Telecom Engineer for Rational Software in the load testing space back in the late ’90s, and when I look back on the last decade, there were enormous advances in the broader IT world including development methodologies, processing speeds, network speeds, mobile devices (it’s hard to believe the first iPhone was only released 6 years ago). But the question is: Has the world of load and performance testing really changed all that much? Are the missions the same? Are the challenges different? And how can we be prepared for the future of load and performance testing? Let’s start with what hasn’t changed.

Book Review: C# 5.0 Unleashed

Fri, 03 May 2013 12:45:00 EDT

In this version of the book the author still starts off by answering the question, "Why do we need another C# book?". I was asking myself that very question when I turned to the introduction of C# 4.0 Unleased which was the first version of this book I read. He says "In short, what sets this book apart from many others is its in-depth coverage of how things work." As far as C# 5.0 books go, I have read C# 5.0 in a Nutshell: The Definitive Reference, Pro C# 2012 and the .NET 4.5 Platform, Essential C# 5.0, and CLR via C# (Dev-Pro) . All very good books, very good!!! C# 5.0 Unleashed belongs on the shelf with them. The author does indeed break down the C# language in a unique and very enjoyable way.

Dell's George Newstrom Charts Govt, Enterprise IT Evolution

Fri, 03 May 2013 12:00:00 EDT

George Newstrom, head of Dell's federal government defense and national security business, outlines the evolution of information technology from mainframes and servers to "disruptive" technologies such as cloud computing and mobile devices. Platform one saw mainframes and terminals hit the market and Newstrom writes this development helped government and other industry end users access thousands of applications, reaching millions of end users. Many places are in the second platform of client and server offerings, which started nearly 25 years ago according to Newstrom.

A Helpful Checklist for Selecting a New Database

Thu, 02 May 2013 09:45:00 EDT

When you look at the database market, it’s a virtual jungle out there. Those of us in the industry 15 years ago can look back and remember when we only had the option to use a relational database from Sybase, Oracle, Microsoft or IBM. That was pretty much it if you were planning to build a new complex application with persistent storage. Nowadays, the number of options is absolutely brilliant, but this also means you need to do your homework. I found a great visualization of the database market landscape by 451 Research. The similarity to the London underground map is striking.

When IT Is Destroying Your Company's Future

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:00:00 EDT

A long time ago, before gray hairs appeared on my head, I was an IT manager. My title was B2B E-Commerce Manager for a computer manufacturer. I remember sitting in long meetings discussing how successful Dell Computer was with their just in time manufacturing and just in time supply chains. I also remember our business representatives asking IT if they could develop systems that would allow us to operate in a similar supply chain model and the answers seemed always to be, "NO!" Our IT systems were not set-up to support a real-time environment. Of course the business would then say this must change if we are going to be competitive, and the IT would say then give us the budget to change. Many years after I had moved on, the computer manufacture closed. This manufacturer had never been able to gain freedom from their business-limiting legacy IT environments. I was in England and Scotland last week teaching SMAC strategies (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) to large companies. In a number of these sessions, I heard echoes from my days at the computer manufacturer, "Our current IT systems are not set-up to support those kinds of things." They were not arguing the need for business and IT transformation, they were simply sharing the reality of their current IT architecture.