Business insight is OpTier's goal, not triage

Andy Wild, president of OpTier, dropped by to discuss OpTier SaaS, and how OpTier differs from its competition in the crowded APM market. In summary, OpTier is focused on providing its customers with business insight rather than just offering triage services when transactional applications slow down or fail. Wild pointed to his company's newest product, OpTier SaaS, as an example.

OpTier SaaS

OpTier is now offering companies access to what it calls "an enterprise APM solution with deep-dive IT operational analytics (ITOA) capabilities in a cloud-based platform". This service offering makes it possible for customers to use OpTier's end-to-end transaction tracing capabilities to quickly identify problems and then resolve them.

Since OpTier SaaS is a cloud-based service, customers need not install or configure software in order to gain this insight.

A bit about OpTier

Wild pointed out that OpTier was founded about six years ago and offered transaction monitoring. This capability is still at the heart of all of the company's other offerings. OpTier's technology makes it possible to "tag" each and every transaction, and enough context information about that transaction to allow customers to see all of the systems, application frameworks, databases, networking, and storage facilities that are involved.

Over time, Wild added, the ability to gather, store, and analyze granular operational data from all of these components was added.

When asked what distinguishes OpTier from all of the other competitors, Wild responded that his company's goal was to help companies by providing insight into their business not just see what is slowing down systems or causing them to fail. This means, of course, that the technology scrapes the logs of components, sniffs what's happening on the network, and gathers data from management interfaces offered by all of the systems and components on the network. 

Rather than storing all of the operational data being generated by those systems, OpTier stores enough information to correlate how everything is performing so that IT or business analysts can learn about run rate characteristics of their systems and be able to see anomalies.

OpTier SaaS combines our end-to-end transaction tracing capabilities with advanced ITOA to provide an enterprise APM solution capable of 2-click problem identification to resolution.

Snapshot analysis

OpTier's demonstration is impressive, but I found myself thinking about how similar it was to presentations offered by 10 or 15 other competitors. All of them appear to offer the ability to see what is happening and predict, to some extent, what is likely to happen next. 

I think that all of the competitors, including OpTier, need to find better ways to articulate what they do, what benefit customers should expect, and pass "the reasonable person test".

What is "the reasonable person test", you ask? It is the simple question that a somewhat knowledgeable person would ask when hearing a company's message for the first time — "Why should I care about you and your products?"

I'm pretty sure that OpTier has a very good set of answers to that simple question. I'm also sure that its customers would express satisfaction with the company and what it is doing for them. My chief concern for OpTier is that the market is very noisy; many of the competitors are saying nearly the same things and their demonstrations look very similar.