As enterprise applications become increasingly critical and complex, Brocade’s George Chacko sheds light on the importance of improving application performance to meet escalating user expectations and business requirements today.
Q1: How critical is application performance for Enterprises today?
A: Web site performance, or response time for an enterprise application, significantly impacts the user experience, and in turn, can dramatically affect the business value of the application. Downtime of mission-critical applications has a direct impact on the bottom line. Application response and reliability need to increase to meet escalating user expectations and business requirements. Improving application performance not only maximizes the value of applications, it also creates opportunities for enterprises to drive revenue and lower costs. Enterprises are also impacted as application performance decreases, directly affecting employee productivity and satisfaction. With so much competition, and ever more impatient consumers willing to switch brands after a poor experience, improving this is clearly vital for customer retention.
“Improving application performance not only maximizes the value of applications, it also creates opportunities for enterprises to drive revenue and lower costs.”
George Chacko
Principal Systems Engineer
& Lead Technical Consultant
Brocade India
Q2. Which sectors are currently witnessing major deployment of applications?
E-commerce and BFSI sectors are witnessing major deployment of applications. Many enterprises have significant revenue streams generated through e-commerce and online applications, as well as cost-saving opportunities, occurring when customers access services online rather than utilizing costlier call centers.
Q3. What are the main concerns of an Enterprise in terms of application performance?
As enterprise applications become increasingly critical, they are also becoming more complex. The introduction of service-oriented architectures, agile development processes and DevOps are all causing applications to increase in complexity. At the same time, the introduction of new IT infrastructure technologies, such as virtualization and cloud, has increased the complexity of the application infrastructure. Legacy tools are not able to communicate the consolidated, cross-functional view of what is occurring with application performance, and hence problem identification, diagnosis, and resolution with the application can take days and weeks instead of minutes.
CIOs are concerned that they do not have the right tools to manage and predict the effects on application performance when a new application is deployed.. The non-performance of application is always detected by the end-users and not the IT department. IT teams must detect problems more proactively, so that they can isolate and fix the problem, well before business is impacted.
Q4. What does Brocade’s vADC solutions portfolio offer to organizations?
Brocade vADC’s industry leading L4-L7 ADC capabilities enable the delivery of a highly secure and responsive solution to end-users. With the ability to provide demand-based scalability and provisioning, and integrated web application firewall and web content optimization, as well as the agility to meet unpredictable workload demands, the solution is purpose built for the cloud and is compatible with leading cloud platforms.
Fast, reliable application delivery across virtual and cloud platforms at massive scale, Brocade vADC helps providers ensure a better end user experience with several capabilities designed to deliver reliability and security. In addition to load balancing and server health monitoring across multiple sites for high availability and reliability, it provides session persistence, content inspection to enable application resource prioritization, and session monitoring to detect attacks that exploit business transactions.
Q5. What is your advice to CIOs looking to optimize application performance for their enterprises?
CIOs should think of moving away from the old IP which is based on closed, proprietary systems, where innovation cycles are constrained by custom hardware, and provisioning network resource is difficult and manual. The New IP encourages innovation and accelerates the speed of application performance. The New IP is based on open source, riding on commodity hardware and merchant silicon, and provisioning of network resource is automated and self-service. It gives a programmatic control over complex tasks, tight integration with business support systems and high-value end user applications, and the freedom to develop strategic techniques for accelerating business growth.
