Overview

Neuralytix recently met with the CTO of Virtual Instruments, Skip Bacon in Frankfurt, Germany. Neuralytix finds offensive, and completely out of touch, that one of our better known competitor was considering putting Virtual Instruments as a storage resource management company (SRM). Now, they think about Virtual Instruments as an application performance management (APM) company. It shows a complete lack of relevance in their research.

Virtual Instruments is an instrumentation company. It’s not a monitoring company. Instrumentation is about enablement. For example, how many IT organizations have the ability to demonstrate that they are able to meet the SLA’s to which they commit? Compare that to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Neuralytix uses AWS. We can see the cost, performance and up-time of our instance. How many IT organizations can do the same? Without Virtual Instruments, as far as data component is concerned, very few.

So, if a line of business (LOB) owners asks an IT organization to provision an application and data services within a given SLA, that LOB manager is interested in a metric that can be compared to his/her profit and loss (P&L) statement. Yet, many IT organizations still report in storage capacity used, CPU or servers used, and network utilization. This is the disconnect between IT and the LOB; one that can drive the LOB to abandon internal IT in favor of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Neuraspective™

What LOB managers are interested in is simply, “did I get what I paid for?” Did my compute/application infrastructure work? Was it up 100%? How much was that infrastructure and application? The LOB manager can then take these data points, and calculate the cost of  technology against the revenue for his particular LOB.

In 2013 and beyond, instrumentation is a necessity. LOB managers are going to go to application-, infrastructure- and software-as-a-Service  if they can’t understand what they’re getting for their money. For the LOB manager, he/she will only care about if the site is up, is it performing well? (It doesn’t have to be at the best possible performance, it just has to work well!), and how much that just costs the LOB.

Ultimately, management without instrumentation is like flying a plane by the seat of your pants – dangerously! Instrumentation is an enabling technology. It is a necessary technology. LOB managers, do yourselves a favor, if your IT organization can’t demonstrate to you what you’re getting for your chargeback, buy it somewhere else!