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One of the cool groups within the broadly tasked IBM Software Services for Tivoli (ISST) organization is the Advanced Technology Group (ATG) and the SWAT teams. The SWAT team is deployed around the world to support the software sales process with workshops, proofs of technology (PoT), proofs of concept (PoC) and advanced pilot type engagements to help win business.

Matthew Rodkey is a Solutions Architect and all around “surfer dude” that is really keen on our fundamental IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) and Composite Application Management (ITCAM) products. He’s been instrumental in development of our “Green” monitoring technology and deployment of our ITCAM for WAS and ITCAM for Transactions products.

Matthew and I had the opportunity to speak about all things Architecture, Design and Deployment Planning related for ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 a week or so ago. Matt offers a unique and different perspective compared to my discussions with Dr. Frank Tate of Gulf Breeze Software. While one was post sales, implementation and deployment related, Matthew’s focus is on making sure we meet the client’s expectations in such a way to win the client’s business.

I walked away from the discussion with much more insight into what it’s going to take for our clients to be successful with ITCAM for Transactions v7.1. This is the first of two parts (sorry, we talked for three hours!).

For other ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 podcasts, see here, here and here.

You may subscribe to my podcast feed via Feedburner, iTunes or simply play or download the podcast from this post.

If you have any feedback or comments on the topic of BTM or the ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 product for myself or Matthew please leave comments. If you currently utilize the ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 product, I’d love to hear from you! If you’re a vendor, subject matter expert or practitioner in the area of Business Transaction Management (BTM) and would like to chat on a podcast, please feel free to contact me directly.

Matthew Rodkey is a Solutions Architect and all around “surfer dude” that is really keen on our fundamental IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) and Composite Application Management (ITCAM) products. He’s been instrumental in development of our “Green” monitoring technology and deployment of our ITCAM for WAS and ITCAM for Transactions products.

Matthew and I had the opportunity to speak about all things Architecture, Design and Deployment Planning related for ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 a week or so ago. Matt offers a unique and different perspective compared to my discussions with Dr. Frank Tate of Gulf Breeze Software. While one was post sales, implementation and deployment related, Matthew’s focus is on making sure we meet the client’s expectations in such a way to win the client’s business.

I walked away from the discussion with much more insight into what it’s going to take for our clients to be successful with ITCAM for Transactions v7.1. This is the first of two parts (sorry, we talked for three hours!).

For other ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 podcasts, see here, here and here.

You may subscribe to my podcast feed via Feedburner, iTunes or simply play or download the podcast from this post.

If you have any feedback or comments on the topic of BTM or the ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 product for myself or Matthew please leave comments. If you currently utilize the ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 product, I’d love to hear from you! If you’re a vendor, subject matter expert or practitioner in the area of Business Transaction Management (BTM) and would like to chat on a podcast, please feel free to contact me directly.

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I’ve spent some time over the past week really digging into the IBM Tivoli ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 product. In the next few podcasts, I will focus on the area I feel most critical to its success being the architecture, design and deployment planning phases as well as how to ensure long term success once it has been deployed and operationalized. You may want to review my BTM podcast with the Development Manager for ITCAM for Transactions Shoel Perelman.

In this first two part podcast, I speak with Gulf Breeze Software, one of IBM Tivoli’s Accredited Business Partners for ITCAM for Transactions v7.1. Dr. Frank Tate and the Gulf Breeze Software team have recently completed one of the few client deployments for this new software release. Frank and I speak in detail about everything related to the architecture, design, deployment planning, deployment into operations and lifecycle needed for ITCAM for Transactions v7.1. Frank is also a regular poster to the Gulf Breeze Software blog where he often shares very useful insight, tips and best practices for many of the IBM Tivoli software products. Take a look at the great post on TBSM!

You may subscribe to my podcast feed via Feedburner, iTunes or simply play or download the podcast from this post.

If you have any feedback or comments on the topic of BTM or the ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 product for myself or Frank please leave comments. If you currently utilize the ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 product, I’d love to hear from you! If you’re a vendor, subject matter expert or practitioner in the area of Business Transaction Management (BTM) and would like to chat on a podcast, please feel free to contact me directly.

In this first two part podcast, I speak with Gulf Breeze Software, one of IBM Tivoli’s Accredited Business Partners for ITCAM for Transactions v7.1. Dr. Frank Tate and the Gulf Breeze Software team have recently completed one of the few client deployments for this new software release. Frank and I speak in detail about everything related to the architecture, design, deployment planning, deployment into operations and lifecycle needed for ITCAM for Transactions v7.1. Frank is also a regular poster to the Gulf Breeze Software blog where he often shares very useful insight, tips and best practices for many of the IBM Tivoli software products. Take a look at the great post on TBSM!

You may subscribe to my podcast feed via Feedburner, iTunes or simply play or download the podcast from this post.

If you have any feedback or comments on the topic of BTM or the ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 product for myself or Frank please leave comments. If you currently utilize the ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 product, I’d love to hear from you! If you’re a vendor, subject matter expert or practitioner in the area of Business Transaction Management (BTM) and would like to chat on a podcast, please feel free to contact me directly.

Hear about:

• How BTM solutions should integrate and complement the typical existing IT management and monitoring architecture.
• How proactive or predictive monitoring may be a part of a value focused BTM solution.
• Start up partnering versus rolling your own.
• How vendors will differentiate once they’ve solved the core discovery, tracing, tracking and stitching foundation with monitoring, analytics and intelligence capabilities.
• How BTM solutions could enable end-to-end capacity and utilization planning, monitoring and management.

In our next podcast, I’d like to speak about the fourth core component of a BTM solution which is Transaction Analytics and Intelligence. I’d also like to chat about how BTM solutions may evolve to support emerging areas such as virtualization, cloud computing, mobile, web2.0, hyper-scale architectures and whatever else may pop up between now and then. Listen to our previous podcasts here, here and here.

You may subscribe to my podcast feed via Feedburner, iTunes or simply play or download the podcast from this post.

If you have any feedback or comments on the topic of BTM for myself or Lanir please leave comments. If you’re a vendor, subject matter expert or practitioner in the area of Business Transaction Management (BTM) and would like to chat on a podcast, please feel free to contact me directly.

Listen to the podcast for insight into the thoughts Lanir shares on these Transaction Tracing, Tracking and Stitching concepts (and more!):

• Learn why transaction tagging may not be the best approach for transaction tracing and tracking
• Hear about Correlsense’s innovative approach to tracing, tracking and stitching transactions
• Listen to Lanir’s thoughts on why ARM is a great concept, could work if thoroughly deployed, and his opinion on why ARM never really took off
• Why consulting, education and knowledge transfer between the vendor, monitoring tools group and key service and application groups (operations, application support/development) is critical to realizing the full value proposition of BTM
• Learn about how the value proposition for BTM increases when extended to the end point using emerging End User Service Management (EUSM) or End User Performance Management (EUPM) solutions such as Aternity, Knoa, Serden and Coradiant
• Why BTM solutions can fill the gap in your change, configuration, release management or CMDB strategy by providing the missing end-to-end logical components missing from most solutions today.

In our next podcast, Lanir and I will discuss the third core capability of a BTM solution which is Transaction Monitoring. Listen to our previous podcasts here and here.

You may subscribe to my podcast feed via Feedburner, iTunes or simply play or download the podcast from this post.

If you have any feedback or comments on the topic of BTM for myself or Lanir please leave comments. If you’re a vendor, subject matter expert or practitioner in the area of Business Transaction Management (BTM) and would like to chat on a podcast, please feel free to contact me directly.

In this podcast, Lanir and I dive into the approach that Correlsense and their SharePath product takes for the first of four key areas that a Business Transaction Management (BTM) solution must incorporate which is Transaction Discovery.

Listen to the podcast for insight into the thoughts Lanir shares on these Transaction Discovery topics:

• Transaction Discovery Techniques and why an agent based approach is the only way to discover end-to-end transaction flows.
• Transaction Types including synchronous, asynchronous and aggregate transaction scenarios.
• Transaction Discovery Agents and why one core agent type is all that’s needed in most cases.
• Architectures for Transaction Discovery Storage, Transaction Data Store or Data Warehousing, OLAP and techniques for supporting both real time and historical analytics and intelligence capabilities (monitoring, dashboards, reporting, charting, what if’s, etc.)

In our next podcast, Lanir and I will discuss the second core capability of a BTM solution which is Transaction Tracing, Tracking and Stitching.

You may subscribe to my podcast feed via Feedburner, iTunes or simply play or download the podcast from this post.

If you have any feedback or comments on the topic of BTM for myself or Lanir please leave comments. If you’re a vendor, subject matter expert or practitioner in the area of Business Transaction Management (BTM) and would like to chat on a podcast, please feel free to contact me directly.

SeaNet Technologies has been around for some time now originally founded in 2001 with their first product in 2003. Their strong suit appears to be in the financial and trading services space with a focus on transaction management in highly complex, mission critical end-to-end, multi tier environments. They claim to be the only vendor in both the enterprise and financial services / trading desk environments at this time.

SeaNet has a unique focus on high volume and latency sensitive transaction management architectures. They focus on not only round trip transaction management but specialize in one way transaction (multi-cast push) discovery, monitoring and management. Precision timing and clock synchronization is one of their specialties.

Here are some of my take aways from this very detailed discussion on BTM as seen by SeaNet Technolgies.

• You must measure the end user experience in terms of the business transaction
• Today, IT resources (people, technology) are consumed with chasing potential problems, “ghosts” or anomalies rather than explicitly focusing on the critical problems
• Pain, suffering and business need are the key drivers to push clients towards a BTM solution.
• It’s not that 99% of the transactions are bad, it’s that 1% are bad and they’re difficult to identify and find when you’re in an environment that handles 2B or more transactions a day, 1% is a lot!
• BTM enables bridging the gap (the Grand Canyon really) between IT and the business (and between IT groups)
• Whomever has the best data wins – if the only data available is that the business has experienced some significant impact (loss of money, trades, etc) then they’re going to be listened to. BTM solutions must equip IT with high quality data to be able to manage problems and anomalies from.
• SeaNet was born into the financial, trading and market services area and this appears to be their strong suit. SeaNet plans investment in “enterprisey” features and functions in the near future such as formal IT management tool or CMDB integrations, ADM and visualization of e2e services, “decoding/mapping” of common and emerging enterprise protocols, applications, etc.
• Adding the “Real Business Context” to discovered transactions is still a manual process and we should be careful about claims from any vendor in this space that “Real Business Context” can be automagically added. I wonder if this is where we need to bring in integrations, information and data from some of the other friendly “B” acronyms such as Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Business Process Management (BPM). Could this be the path to automatically associate the “Real Business Context” to discovered low level transactions? I think so.
• Successfully adopting BTM solutions requires one or more new roles within IT and the business that have deep business and IT knowledge and experience across the entire end-to-end service delivery chain
• The “typical” enterprise monitoring group must evolve and mature to be successful with BTM in many areas such as in depth knowledge of application and transactional architectures, business operations and business impact assessment/understanding
• There is some level of expected maturity, standardization and operational preparedness expected in terms of general IT management and monitoring before venturing into deployment of a BTM solution. For example, thorough instrumentation and monitoring of applications (COTS and Custom) should be in place.

It was a great discussion and opportunity for me to hear about the BTM approach from the perspective of a company that is a bit different than those I’ve spoken with to this point. It’s very clear that the financial and trading market services market has a very different need than many traditional enterprises and service providers.

This pedigree, coupled with SeaNet’s network based passive approach to transaction discovery and inventory, tracing and stitching, monitoring, intelligence and analytics sounds like a solid foundation for a business transaction management solution. I’d enjoy hearing more from a SeaNet Technologies customer or others with direct experience with their technology and products.

You may subscribe to my podcast feed via Feedburner, iTunes or simply play or download the podcast from this post.

If you have any feedback or comments on the topic of BTM for myself, Bernie or Raymond, please leave comments. If you’re a vendor, subject matter expert or practitioner in the area of Business Transaction Management (BTM) and would like to chat on a podcast, please feel free to contact me directly.

Correlsense is positioning their flagship SharePath product as the “Next Generation of Application Performance Management”. Lanir paints his vision of one consolidated BTM platform that becomes the leading IT datacenter management solution incorporating components of user experience management (UEM), application performance management (APM) and business transaction management (BTM). As he says, the days of multiple point products from one or more vendors to cover individual technology silos are short lived. This vision is in perfect alignment with mine and the broader BSM Value Proposition nicely incorporating key components of a maturing and value oriented BSM strategy.

The ability of the SharePath product to go “end-to-end” in a relatively short amount of time was a clear message from part one of our discussion. We establish what BTM means to Correlsense and how BTM will address the countless problems with supporting complex applications and end-to-end transactions in today’s modern IT datacenters. Lanir has considerable depth and detailed hands on experience in this area and it’s evident in our discussion. He’s lived through countless war room firefights trying to identify, isolate and resolve complex application performance and transaction problems. He brings tremendous credibility to what Correlsense is striving to become.

You may subscribe to my podcast feed via Feedburner, iTunes or simply play or download the podcast from this post. In part two, we’ll continue to dive into the BTM area and learn more about how SharePath works. I hope you enjoy this first podcast. If you have any feedback or comments on the topic of BTM for myself or Lanir, please leave comments.

If you’re a vendor, subject matter expert or practitioner in the area of Business Transaction Management (BTM) and would like to chat on a podcast, please feel free to contact me directly.

Shoel is relatively new to his role, moving from successfully releasing the new Tivoli Integrated Portal (TIP) component recently. He’s already got a strong grip on BTM after a short six weeks in the new role and deeply understands its value to Business Service Management (BSM) based on his background where he was instrumental in developing the Micromuse BSM product (Netcool/SLAM, Netcool/RAD and now TBSM v4.x).

Shoel and I talked through various areas including BTM Value Proposition, what exactly BTM is and what components or functions should be in a BTM solution and challenges with BTM Adoption. If you’re new to the concept of BTM, please view some of my thoughts on what it is here.

You may subscribe to my podcast feed via Feedburner, iTunes or simply play or download the podcast from this post. I hope you enjoy this podcast. If you have any feedback or comments on the topic of BTM for myself or Shoel, please leave comments.

If you’re a vendor, subject matter expert or practitioner in the area of Business Transaction Management (BTM) and would like to chat on a podcast, please feel free to contact me directly.