Survey Finds IT Departments Still Struggle with Application Performance Issues Despite Availability of Effective Management Tools

Survey Finds IT Departments Still Struggle with Application Performance Issues
Despite Availability of Effective Management Tools
67 Percent of IT Managers Surveyed Are Not Tracking Business Transactions;
Application Integration has Greater Impact on Complexity of IT Infrastructure
than SOA, Virtualization and Cloud Computing Combined

NEW YORK, Nov. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- OpTier®, the leader in Business Transaction
Management (BTM), today announced results of a survey that indicates that most
organizations are experiencing significant IT issues including trouble
resolving performance problems due to a lack of visibility into IT
transactions, challenges collaborating between departments and poor alignment
between business and IT priorities. The survey of more than 300 IT managers
was commissioned by OpTier and conducted by TechWeb Research.

It found that 40 percent of organizations have experienced serious IT problems
over the past year. While BTM has been proven as an effective technique for
understanding complex architectures, 67 percent of respondents fail to track
business transactions flowing through their systems. At the same time, 88
percent believe the number of transactions flowing through their IT
infrastructure is increasing.

The recent survey also uncovered critical issues within organizations leading
to difficulties in managing and mitigating performance problems. Nearly half
of respondents indicate that application integration provides the greatest
impact on the complexity of their infrastructure, beating out virtualization
(16 percent), SOA (6 percent) and cloud computing (4 percent) combined.

Furthermore, the survey found that 72 percent of IT managers find service
outages to be extremely or very painful, equating them to a migraine or
toothache. More than 60 percent of IT managers surveyed also feel that the
complexity of managing IT is extremely or very difficult, or equivalent to
grandmaster chess or the New York Times crossword puzzle.

"The results of our survey echo the pain points we're hearing from our
customers and prospects. As their IT architectures become more complex, they
are most concerned about aligning IT with business goals and making more
efficient use of their IT resources," said Motti Tal, EVP of marketing,
product and business development at OpTier. "However, they can't measure what
they don't know. Until businesses adopt an end-to-end transactional view to
managing their IT environment, there is little chance that they will be able
to improve performance and avoid costly outages."

As IT architecture becomes more complex, the IT staff has multiple concerns.
Making more efficient use of existing IT resources ranked as the most
significant concern, followed by aligning IT with business goals. Impacting
these concerns are the challenges facing IT when resolving performance
problems. Ranked highest was the challenge of collaborating with other
departments, followed by the lack of visibility into IT transactions.

"Performance issues are expensive. Our survey indicates that the total cost of
an outage can soar into the millions of dollars, and they happen at an
alarmingly frequent rate -- a quarter of respondents experience service
performance issues monthly," said Tal. "As networks continue to grow more
complex, assuring availability and performance of transactions will become
harder to achieve. IT staff must look to solutions like BTM software in order
to address and mitigate performance issues."

About OpTier

OpTier® develops software for companies whose business depends on
transactions. OpTier's Business Transaction Management solution (OpTier
BTM(TM)) provides the highest level of application performance and
availability by helping IT assure the quick and successful execution of all
business transactions.

OpTier BTM is the only solution that delivers real-time, end-to-end visibility
and management of all business transactions across all tiers -- combining data
center transaction visibility with end-user experience monitoring. This unique
ability allows IT applications and operations teams to avoid outages and to
isolate and resolve performance issues faster than ever before, using far
fewer resources. The OpTier solution reduces operational cost and risk by
simplifying IT management and by enabling organizations to manage IT from the
business perspective. For more information, visit www.optier.com.

"Active Context Tracking", OpTier, OpTier BTM, OpTier CoreFirst, OpTier
Experience Manager and the tagline "Putting first things first" are trademarks
of OpTier Ltd.

Contacts:
Lindsay Diamond Avi Dines or Jennifer Barlow
OpTier Schwartz Communications, Inc.
212-679-2700 781-684-0770
lindsay.diamond@optier.com OpTier@schwartz-pr.com

SOURCE OpTier

Lindsay Diamond of OpTier, +1-212-679-2700, lindsay.diamond@optier.com; or Avi
Dines or Jennifer Barlow, both of Schwartz Communications, Inc. for OpTier,
+1-781-684-0770, OpTier@schwartz-pr.com