Application Performance Engineering Blog – Shunra Software

Many organizations are quickly realizing that the days of purchasing bundles of large scale software suites, such as an ERP, are coming to an end – maybe even faster than they could have anticipated. This trend has emerged due to the global recession, which many economists are saying will only get worse before it gets better. In turn, this is forcing organizations to reconsider how much they invest on mission critical enterprise software that is paramount to running the business, which consequently, has large enterprise software vendors – like SAP – struggling to address the issue in a timely manner.

The premise of this issue is discussed in detail in a recent InfoWorld article Could the recession be good for enterprise software?, which focuses on how the recession could benefit enterprise software vendors (if they change the way they sell their products). However, a key part to this discussion that isn’t mentioned in the article is that if the recession does benefit enterprise software, how will this paradigm shift impact the organizations managing this software? In other words, while this new approach might actually prove to be lucrative for large software vendors, it could also present real challenges for the organizations that must ensure the continuity and performance of these applications with limited resources, infrastructure and IT budget.

With the advent of new Web platforms and delivery mechanisms, customers are looking for more innovative solutions that provide greater flexibility and customization and are less expensive than the large software suites. A few prime examples are Cloud Computing; which entails Web 2.0, SaaS (Software as a Service), BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) and many others. Customers are increasingly investing more in these areas because they can reduce costs by not having to own and manage the infrastructure that serves their business services and applications across the Web. As the demand for these Web platforms and technologies increases, organizations must ensure that new business services and applications deployed across distributed networks will perform to their SLAs and meet end-user expectations.

This is exactly where network emulation technology becomes indispensable, because it provides these organizations with a means to accurately model and test complex network environments in a lab. Without such a technology, there is a tremendous amount of time wasted or misappropriated because IT teams are in a reactive mode troubleshooting issues that could have otherwise been resolved far earlier in the application development lifecycle, thus saving time, effort and most importantly, cost.