Road-show in APAC: It Was a Hell of a Ride!
A couple of weeks ago I returned from a business trip to Korea and China where I met with a number of customers and partners from various vertical markets. The most interesting thing about this trip was that these two countries continue to encounter huge increases in their Internet traffic due to steady, on-going online business expansion. The customers I met with included an online payment services company, various leading mobile carriers, a large bank and a cable network operator among others. What I found common to these companies is that almost all of them are considering their next-generation strategy with regards to their data center technologies and operations. And while each customer obviously has a different environment with distinct applications and infrastructures it was clear that they are all keen on delivering one thing – an optimized Web experience.
Specifically, with one of the carrier accounts our discussion gravitated toward the following question: How can you really be sure of what your end-users actually experience? Frankly, there is no silver bullet to this question. Both the customer and I agreed that it’s not sufficient enough to provide means for application acceleration like we offer today in the form of SSL acceleration, caching, compression, etc. These are all given in today’s modern application delivery controllers (ADC) and customers already appreciate and leverage them. Of course, our latest FastView Web Performance Optimization (WPO) technology was great news, but again, something else was missing…
As we continued to discuss, our list of questions grew: how can you tell whenever an SLA is breached? How can you tell when things have gone wrong? When your application responds poorly? If you have all of the latest & greatest acceleration features, when and how would it be best to use them? We concluded that what is needed is a proactive approach that continuously seeks to find out and detect these types of performance glitches. Most importantly, it must do so in real-time.
At that moment, I was really happy to introduce the customer to our recently announced Application Performance Monitoring (APM) module. The beauty of our APM is not only that it provides insight and visibility options that ensure application SLA is met, but it can also be instantly enabled using a simple subscription software license. In addition, being an integrated part of our next-generation Alteon ADC, it resides in the perfect location in the network – just in front of the servers running applications – so that no intrusive change to application code or deployment of monitoring probes are required! And last but not least, because the APM tracks and monitors real-user activity and real transactions you don’t need to manually script synthetic transactions. To make a long story short – our customer loved this story and saw a lot of value in it.
A final word to those customers with access to Radware’s Customer Central: I invite you to participate in our Early Access (EA) program, to experience the APM for yourselves.
Until next time,
Nir