Knoa Virtual/Cloud Experience Manager (VCEM) helps manufacturers increase agility, lower costs

Knoa VCEM is said to deliver a new end-user experience monitoring solution for virtualization, cloud, and SaaS, designed to accelerate transition for enterprise applications.

November 19, 2009
Why does managing cloud-based application helps manufacturers?

Many large manufacturers do not want to place customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications in virtual/cloud environments for fear they won’t be able to see how they’re interacting with these applications, according to Knoa Software.
The Knoa Virtual/Cloud Experience Manager (VCEM) allows organizations to see how the end-user is interacting and alerts IT administrators, in real time, when there are issues with that relationship, whether it is the application or the end-user. IT then can make the necessary fixes, Knoa says, so the end-user can pay attention to the work on hand. That helps increase productivity. K noa provides end-user performance monitoring software, the KnoaExperience and Performance Management (EPM) solution, which monitorshow well end-users are interacting with business-critical applicationslike SAP, Oracle-Siebel, Oracle EBS, JD Edwards and Microsoft Outlook.After hearing that many customers are leery of placing those sameapplications into virtual or cloud environments, Knoa engineered andlaunched VCEM, which provide metrics on issues being delivered inreal-time to an organization’s IT department.

Knoa Software, provider of end-user experience and performance management software, now offers the Knoa Virtual/Cloud Experience Manager (VCEM), which it calls the "the first truly‘off-the-shelf’ product that monitors and manages real end-user experience for enterprise applications that are running in virtualized environments, delivered via SaaS, or provisioned via cloud computing."

These non-traditional delivery models represent a significant disruption in the provisioning model for the infrastructure on which applications run, Knoa says. In many cases, the benefits of increased agility, reduced costs and sustainability are lost as the new provisioning paradigms introduce business risk. Forrester Research Inc. reports that "most enterprises seem to have taken a very cautious attitude toward‘virtualizating’ their critical applications. Virtualization poses a new series of management problems that require resolution within the existing framework of IT management.

When a satisfactory answer is provided, the economic value of the technology will become clearer and have a significant impact on enterprise critical applications." That was according to Forrester Research, May 13, 2009, "Inquiry Insight: IT Management Software -Sustained Activity In Spite Of The Economic Downturn," by JP Garbani.

Knoa says its Experience and Performance Manager (EPM) is the only end-user monitoring product that simultaneously meets the user performance needs of the business and the end-user experience needs of the IT organization. Knoa VCEM extends this concept to the worlds of SaaS, virtualization and cloud computing with a streamlined, turnkey application designed specifically to support the management needs of the IT operations team changing the provisioning model for business critical applications like SAP, Oracle EBS, Oracle Siebel and Microsoft Outlook, Knoa says.

"IT organizations are under tremendous pressure to continue to deliver the hard dollar ROI and operational agility benefits that come from virtualizing servers. Most large enterprises have virtualized their‘low hanging fruit’ and must now turn to business critical ‘tier 1′ applications to deliver the next rounds of these benefits to their organizations," said Bernd Harzog, lead analyst – virtualization performance and capacity management, with The Virtualization Practice. "However, many IT operations teams are finding resistance from applications owners due to perceived uncertainty on the part of the applications owners as to how their application will perform on a shared virtual infrastructure."

Knoa Software Virtual/Cloud Experience Manager (VCEM) Baseline Report

Knoa VCEM features

Knoa VCEM is designed to mitigate the inherent risk to business continuity that any disruption to the back-end infrastructure raises, especially with:

– Dynamic Benchmarking , which enables the IT organization to compare system performance prior to the change with system performance before and after each change in the back-end infrastructure. Dynamic Benchmarking is available for all system performance metrics, including transaction response times, system errors and utilization.

Knoa Software Virtual/Cloud Experience Manager (VCEM) Dual Timeframes

– Comprehensive Threshold Alerting , which allows IT organizations to create and manage alerts based upon established service level agreements (SLA). Alerts can be delivered via email or integrated into existing performance management consoles to provide the IT team with a "single pane of glass" for performance management.

– Dynamic Base-lining , which allows the IT organization to monitor when any performance metric (response time, quality or utilization) varies from short or long-term trends. Dynamic base-lining directly attacks the difficult issue of ensuring minimal performance degradation for the thousands of transactions for which meaningful SLA thresholds have not yet been set.

– Advance Root Cause Analysis , which allows the IT Operations team to evaluate the impact of end-user behavior and desktop resources and conditions on any performance anomaly. This is available as an additional capability.
Users care about the response time of the transactions within the application, says Harzog. "This allows IT operations to provide a proven baseline of end-user experience to the applications teams before the application is virtualized, and then allow for continuous comparative measurements against that baseline as progressive layers of the application system are placed in the shared virtual infrastructure."

The IT software uses Knoa’s Universal Client Agent, a passive desktop agent, to capture its performance metrics.
"The only relevant measurement point for any and all performance metrics is the end-user’s desktop," says Lori Wizdo, vice president, marketing, Knoa Software. "End-user monitoring provides one version of the truth so IT teams," which eliminates the impact of user perceptions about application performance, for increased agility, reduced costs and sustainability.

Also read from MBT:

– FusionOps cloud-based, on-demand enterprise performance management solution ;
– NetSuite OneWorld for Oracle brings cloud computing to division, retains corporate ERP .

– Edited by Mark T. Hoske, electronic products editor, Manufacturing Business Technology , MBT www.mbtmag.com