The Spring thaw is coming.  I know it is.!  It’s something that is palpable. The early warning signs are evident. Besides, I’ve been trained to believe in the spring – no matter how hard the winter. 

Up here in the northeast, this winter has been long and cold.  We got snow early, then it got cold – very cold, and every time we thought we might get a break another cold snap or another foot of snow buried us – to the point where we have but a faint memory of sunny skies and warm water. In many ways this winter has been a metaphor for the world of post-bubble start-ups.  But as sure as spring eventually follows winter, I see signs of the coming “ice-out” of the technology start-up market. 

As many of you already know, I have recently assumed the interim CEO role at Altaworks – an interesting company in southern New Hampshire.  Altaworks has a software management product that makes it possible to understand the detailed performance of the application infrastructure – the application “highway” that runs over the network infrastructure “highway.” 

In my role as the CEO of Altaworks, I’ve had a chance to meet with many enterprise customers, and as a result of these discussions, I have observed a few things about the status and pain of the enterprise customer that leads me to my belief that Spring is near.

Observation #1: There is a definite understanding of the concept of the “application infrastructure.”

One consistent theme of enterprise IT is that they are aware of an “application infrastructure” – distinctly separate from the network infrastructure they have managed for some time.  This application infrastructure includes distributed application communication and transaction systems, database connection and transaction systems, cross-application “connectors,” object and applet depositories, application authentication and security functions, and storage and server resources – essentially, the mechanisms that provide the highway for the application logic to function over. 

Observation #2: Mission critical applications are being deployed at an increasing rate.

The past couple of years, application servers based on Java and J2EE have solidified around BEA, IBM and Oracle.  During this same period, web-enterprise applications have continued to be deployed and a majority of these are mission-critical situations with real revenue and costs at stake.  This is one of the rare technology trends that didn’t stall in 2002.

Observation #3: The application infrastructure requires specific and powerful management tools.

Just like network infrastructures, application infrastructures require tools for monitoring and management; focused on application performance, security, and end-to-end transaction monitoring instead of network device health, network traffic analysis, network protocol analysis, and end-to-end network latency.   Unfortunately, the dominance around specific application architectures has not led to universal application logic.  Since all applications are somewhat different and they are so critical to the bottom line, understanding their behavior and performance has become a very important need.

The application infrastructure has become a complex mesh of server nodes.  If you consider a 3-tier application as one dimension with load balancers and virtual addresses as another dimension, you have a two-dimensional array of server nodes representing the application.  But then if you include the multiple methods, processes and connections supported by each server node, you have an N-dimensional array of possible performance problem spots all within the application.  Tools to identify these problem spots, both before production deployment and after, are essential.  If you get these tools right, you can create a sort of early warning system for application response time problems.

The complexity of the problem and the urgency of the customer pain are the main reasons why I am so bullish on Altaworks (and our competitors Wily, Precise, and others) and the unique solutions to solving these problems that we have developed.

So more than ever before, the action seems to be around the application – securing it, making it perform better, helping it to connect with other applications, etc.  All of this makes me feel like a thaw is in the works.  But, before I go too far, there are some barriers to success.

It seems even though the enterprises are ready to acknowledge the importance of these issues, they are not always ready to buy products to solve them.  While there is a growing awareness of something called the application infrastructure, and a growing recognition of the critical need for products related to its management, the enterprise is not always organized around the application infrastructure layer and therefore often not ready to take advantage of such products. 

In response to this, I have begun to speak to enterprises about Application Quality Management – a subject I first wrote about a few years ago.  The AQM concept can be focused to address the application infrastructure.  I talk to enterprise customers about AQM along three general themes – first, the importance of the systems test phase prior to deploying applications into production; second, a taxonomy for understanding all of the management tools and which ones to select to achieve quality; and third, the importance of organizing around the application infrastructure so there is a dedicated team focused on the needs and issues of application quality management.  Soon, I plan to update the Acuitive white paper on AQM to include these new subjects. 

So why do I think Spring thaw is on the horizon? Well, whenever you see real customer pain, there is an opportunity.   Whether it’s application security, web services, or application performance and configuration – these problems will likely be solved by startups with new technologies.  When these new technologies provide real solutions that address the real customer pain, then I can’t help but believe that the market opportunity for such solutions is going to increase dramatically.  The start-ups in the best position, of course, are those that have reduced their costs and made it through the winter.  For as sure as we had 20-degrees below zero here in New Hampshire just a couple of weeks ago, Spring will come …I see.the signs around us.

(volume 6, number 2)