Computerworld - Three forces are colliding to create an inflection point for the enterprise:
First, the need to continue to integrate applications at a rapid pace.
Second, the shift to a new platform and new approach for doing those integrations.
Third, the continued drive for previously unattainable levels of business agility.
This inflection point is bad news for some and good news for others. It is a market discontinuity just as we had when the client/server wave hit and again when the e-commerce Web wave hit.
The convergence of these forces on the enterprise creates a need and a requirement for deep real-time visibility that for the first time allows businesses to evaluate information within their total business context for fast action and continuous business improvement. Then and only then, can an enterprise hope to achieve true agility—the ability to see, understand and act in real time.
Deep, real-time visibility
XML Web services dramatically change the nature of enterprise applications. Distributed computing is a fact of life in all major corporations because no one application does it all and business processes cross application boundaries.
What has changed is the nature of the middleware—the software plumbing—used to connect those distributed applications. Web services create loosely coupled distributed applications that send XML business messages between computers. XML represents the first time a universally accepted standard format for business data interchange has ever existed. There are more than 500 distinct XML dialects already established and standardized for every industry imaginable. Each one—like all XML messages—is readable and self-describing.
The following table lists the key requirements for a solution that closes the gaps that have prevented us from achieving deep real-time visibility to provide total business context.
View and correlate both IT and business data
Closing the traditional visibility gap between IT and business systems requires visibility into IT baseline data. Visibility into the health and correctness of integrated systems is a critical starting point. A full understanding of performance, compliance with service-level agreements and trends to aid in capacity planning are a must for any critical business application and even more so for a more complex distributed one.
Access in real time just what's critical from the full message
XML Web service applications quickly expand to use lots of computing nodes. A node is usually an application server that, in turn, is usually a dual- or quad-CPU machine. Each CPU in such a configuration will send and receive XML messages. Deep visibility requires the entirety of every message at the critical nodes is visible. But information overload avoidance requires node-level filtering rules to select out just the critical information needed to achieve total business context for real-time decision-making.
Solving application issues over the WAN requires careful consideration. Based on their independent research, Forrester Consulting offers recommendations on how to tackle application performance issues, insufficient bandwidth and the inability to quickly restore users in a disaster.
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