Shunra Software

Analyst Coverage

Enterprise Management Associates

This EMA Advisory Note is a five page excerpt from a recently published EMA report entitled 'An Adopter's Guide to User Experience Management: How to Pick the Right QoE Solution for You!' (Adopter's Guide). The Adopter’s Guide is specifically designed to help you select the right Quality of Experience (QoE) solution to improve the interactive experience of your application end users based primarily on your functional and business needs, your role, and the constituency (constituencies) you are looking to serve.

This excerpt focuses on one of the leading vendors in the report, Shunra and their Virtual Enterprise solution. Click here to read report.

Enterprise Management Associates

Enterprise Management Associates covers Shunra's new partnerships with HP and Microsoft in this Impact Brief. These partnerships provide a new level of software testing capability to developers, Quality Assurance (QA) professionals and application performance engineers using HP and Microsoft solutions. Shunra's VE Desktop Professional generates a test-bed simulation of the enterprise network for detecting potential performance problems and execution bottlenecks before applications are deployed to the wide area network. EMA writes about these capabilities and partnerships, and describes the impact on the market and the development process. Click here to read report.

"EMA sees this capability as being critical to the development process, since today’s applications are network-intensive and performance problems can, and often do, impact user productivity, customer satisfaction, and the cost of doing business." — EMA, Impact Brief, February 24, 2009

Virtual Vigilance: Managing Application Performance in Virtual Environments

Aberdeen's research found that organizations that are conducting server, desktop and storage virtualization projects are experiencing 18% reductions in infrastructure cost and 15% saving in utility cost. As organizations are conducting virtualization projects to achieve operational efficiencies and manageability of enterprise infrastructure, they are looking to ensure that virtualization projects do not negatively impact performance of business-critical applications.

"Even though organizations could experience significant cost savings from conducting virtualization projects, these benefits could diminish if they don't have capabilities in place for effective management of application performance. ...this requires a set of capabilities and functionalities that were not required when these organizations were looking to achieve the same performance goals in physical environments. Understanding what these capabilities is making the different between success and failure of virtualization projects as measured from business prospective.” " — Virtual Vigilance: Managing Application Performance in Virtual Environments

Click here to read the full report now.

Frost & Sullivan Interviews Shunra CTO, Les Murphy

Download this Movers & Shakers Interview of Les Murphy, CTO, Shunra Software by Olga Yashkova, Industry Analyst/Program Leader, Frost & Sullivan. Topics include application performance management and monitoring & test automation industries; current market/technological trends in the test automation and application performance management markets; end-user concerns and how Shunra supports end user's needs and application performance success. Click here to download now.

Benchmark Report: Optimizing WAN for Application Acceleration

"Best-in-Class organizations are taking a lifecycle approach to deploying technology solutions to improve performance of applications running on their networks." — Optimizing WAN for Application Acceleration

In August of 2007 Aberdeen surveyed more than 430 organizations and 93% of them indicated that they need more visibility and control over the performance of their networks. As organizations are leveraging bandwidth-intense applications, finding the balance between maximizing network and application performance and optimizing costs to operate and manage the network is becoming increasingly important. This report is a roadmap for organizations that desire to achieve those goals through Best-in-Class use of technology solutions for WAN optimization and application acceleration.

Download this benchmark report now: Optimizing WAN for Application Acceleration (Bojan Simic, Aberdeen Group, October, 2007.)

The Real Value of Network Visibility

"Best-in-Class organizations are three-times more likely to have the ability to understand the interdependencies among applications on the network as compared to laggards." — Aberdeen, The Real Value of Network Visibility

Aberdeen Group surveyed 205 organizations in December 2007 to identify practices for enterprise network visibility initiatives and controls. This report is a roadmap for organizations that are striving to accomplish their business goals by deploying capabilities and deployment technology solutions for network monitoring, analytics, and simulation.

Best-in-Class organizations are 35% more likely to use a lab environment for simulating network performance in application pre-deployment stage as compared to laggards. These organizations are two-times more likely to report improvements in their ability to accurately estimate the impact of new technology rollouts on network performance.

Download this benchmark report now: The Real Value of Network Visibility (Bojan Simic, Aberdeen Group, December, 2007.)

Enterprise Management Associates

"Delivering a high Quality of Experience (QoE) to remote end-users is a critical requirement for enterprises operating in national and global markets. Yet QoE is constantly jeopardized by the need to support a growing range of applications, consolidation projects and IT initiatives. To achieve a high level of predictable QoE requires well integrated real-world testing with detailed performance analysis, coupled with good collaborative processes across the IT organization. Shunra VE 5.0 addresses this need by providing a comprehensive testing solution that combines advanced network simulation with transaction analysis in a manner that can support a wide range of roles from network engineers, to application development and QA testing." Dennis Drogseth, Vice President. (May 2007)

"Shunra VE 4.0 is an elegant combination of innovative technology and real, pragmatic benefits. Shunra VE 4.0 is a versatile and easily deployed solution that can provide IT with clear insights into how new business applications and converging technologies, such as VoIP, will be able to meet service level requirements before deployment. This, when combined with automated insights into capacity requirements, makes Shunra's a distinctive offering in the enterprise management marketplace. Shunra VE 4.0 should appeal not only to IT planners and application developers, but to IT executives seeking an insurance policy to guarantee that application service commitments can be met before embarrassing violations force costly changes in infrastructure and/or application design." Dennis Drogseth, Vice President (February 2006)

Also see EMA's Research Note "How to Optimize Application QoE Before Rollout"

Ptak, Noel & Associates

"Networked services and applications have emerged as the most popular solutions architecture in the enterprise today. Distributed solutions, Service Oriented Architectures, IP based services with their striking cost advantage, global partnerships and collaboration place enormous stress on the underlying network infrastructure.

Taking all of these together and you have an operational network environment that can play havoc with networked application performance because of dependencies, interactions, and behavior that cannot possibly be replicated in a development environment. To meet the high expectations and rigorous demands of today's global competition, networked services must be rigor?usly tested under a range of conditions to assure performance. Accurate physical reproduction of global network conditions is prohibitively expensive in terms of resources and time for even the largest enterprise.

Yet, testing must be done.

Virtually no enterprise has escaped the experience of data center relocation and/or consolidation. As noted above, these can cause tremendous disruption in services even when done in planned stages and even with provision made for extra resources in terms of processor power and bandwidth during transitional periods.

Shunra provides the enterprise with a solution to the testing dilemma with its Shunra VE network simulation product which includes a rich library of operational models in a comprehensive, integrated, easy-to-use automated modeling, analysis and performance evaluation tool. With Shunra's VE 5.0, enterprise IT professionals can use simulations to create, test, and evaluate changes in application architectures, network configurations, and data center setup and locations under wide range of operational conditions." Rich Ptak (April 2007)

Read Ptak, Noel & Associates' commentary "Ptak, Noel & Associates: Shunra VE 5.0: Simulation tool for today's IT" (April, 2007)

Yankee Group

"WAN optimization now is hot, hot, hot. The timing is perfect for Shunra. I haven't seen this from any other vendor. It's pretty powerful." Vanessa Alvarez (May 2007)

The 451 Group

"While network emulation has long been identified with capacity planning and pre-deployment testing, Shunra has adapted its VE product line to diagnose WAN application performance problems. The new VE Analyzer can quickly break down transactions, assess the stage causing the problem, evaluate application efficiency and display bandwidth usage." Steve Steinke (April 2007)

Got to www.the451group.com to read the full "Shunra VE 5.0 fights poor application performance with emulation" Impact Analysis

Frost and Sullivan

"The Best Practices that led to Shunra's significant revenue growth are an extensive product portfolio, high-value and easy to use products, technological innovation, excellent customer service, and strategic partnerships. Shunra has many of the competitive factors needed to be successful in the network performance monitoring and management solution market for enterprises. The company has vast experience in this market, and it knows about changing customer needs and requirements. Shunra exhibits strong profitability and margin controls, and its products meet enterprise, ISV/IHV and carriers' requirements, including technology. It is clear that Shunra's spectacular growth is a result of business skill and strategy, and Frost & Sullivan expects this company to continue to succeed in this market in the coming years as well. As a result, Shunra is conferred the 2006 Frost & Sullivan Award for Growth Strategy Leadership in the world network performance monitoring and management solution market for enterprises." Olga Yashkova (January 2007)

Read the complete Frost and Sullivan Research Note

Butler Group

"The increasing complexity of today's network infrastructures and applications are matched by management demands for increased reliability, availability, and optimal performance: the need for ITPM tools is therefore growing. Whether it is large corporate users, offshore companies, or ISVs, all face demands for higher quality in services and deliverables, heightened b? increasing competitive business pressures. Shunra's Virtual Enterprise Solution helps face these challenges.

Furthermore, VE can help application lifecycle management, enabling improved collaboration between developers, testers, production operators, and customer service. VE can be used during all the lifecycle phases: Unit and integration testing; Function, load, and benchmark testing; Readiness and acceptance testing; Network baselining and capacity planning; Service level assurance; and Post-deployment troubleshooting.

Infrastructure and application issues are easier to resolve through the facility to replay, troubleshoot, and plan ahead in the virtual environment. Butler Group believes using VE can reduce risk in running large and/or complex IT departments, especially where mission critical applications are involved."

Michael Azoff (February 2005)

Read the complete Butler Group Shunra VE 3.5 Technology Audit