Application Performance Over the Network is No Longer Just the Responsibility of the Networking Experts, New Survey Reveals.

NEW YORK -- According to Shunra(TM), a Growing Number of IT Professionals are Optimizing Distributed Application Performance by Bringing the Application and Network Together During All Phases of the Development Lifecycle

Application performance over the network is increasingly being addressed throughout the development lifecycle. As a result, companies are placing the responsibility for distributed application performance optimization on more roles and functions across the IT organization, according to a recent survey sponsored by Shunra.

With applications becoming more and more dependent on and sensitive to the network, the survey found that companies are increasingly recognizing that the only way to deliver optimal quality of experience to remote end-users is by taking the production network conditions into account throughout all phases of the application lifecycle. According to the survey, 47% of respondents recognized the advantages of working with a replica of the production network during application development, in order to detect potential real-world performance issues while they're still relatively easy and inexpensive to fix. Another 44% of respondents followed this approach during pre-deployment, including diagnostics, network auditing and capacity planning, and the remaining 9% primarily used it for addressing customer support issues and service level assurance.

"There is a big business risk when deploying a key application in the production environment without first knowing how it will behave," commented Ian Hugill, Infrastructure Manager at Pindar Set Ltd. and one of the survey participants. Pindar Set is the sole supplier for all Yellow Pages and Business Pages UK display ad and directory database management and pre-press needs, and the sole supplier for Yellow Book USA's external pre-press needs. Pindar Set's studios are located in the UK, USA, and India.

Continued Hugill, "With such a heavy volume of data being transmitted across our global network, avoiding the costly consequences of performance problems is a top priority for Pindar Set. We therefore work with a virtual replica of our production network environment during the application development lifecycle to understand performance implications and ensure that costly communication links are provisioned accurately, before deployment. This gives us the insight we need to deploy our applications cost effectively and with the utmost confidence."

The survey also found that this new approach is being effectively applied to a broad range of distributed applications and services. ERP, CRM, email, and custom corporate applications represented 38% of all business applications mentioned, closely followed by applications for VoIP and videoconferencing (33%). Other applications included business intelligence, management systems, manufacturing systems, CAD engineering applications, and online gaming.

"IT professionals shouldn't have to worry about whether the distributed application and infrastructure they've just spent months and millions of dollars to build will actually work for remote end-users when it's launched into production," said Glenn O'Donnell, Program Director, META Group. "Companies must adopt a lifecycle approach, where they develop and test applications in an environment that replicates the real world as closely as possible. This approach will help eliminate pre-deployment risk, and reduce the costs of delivering applications into production, while accelerating time-to-benefit, and improving uptime, reliability and quality of the end-user experience."

A priority for many respondents was to assess and ensure the health of their enterprise infrastructure, including networks, wireless connectivity, and SAN/NAS implementations. They also indicated they used the new approach to validate the performance of their application architectures. Key technologies mentioned in this category included Web services, .NET, and Citrix deployments or other remote terminal services, as well as databases, directory services and QoS. In addition, respondents said they were validating and optimizing the effectiveness of data center consolidation projects, disaster recovery plans and outsourcing engagements.

The survey, sponsored by Shunra, reviewed 65 international organizations from a variety of industries including financial services, telecom, biotech, retail, entertainment and government.

About Shunra

Shunra delivers a family of application and network optimization solutions for distributed enterprises that create a "safe" production environment (i.e. a virtual enterprise) to work in throughout the development lifecycle. These solutions allow software developers, quality assurance, networking, performance and operations professionals to understand the end-user experience in a distributed environment during the development and delivery of new or changed applications and infrastructure. Over 1,400 leading enterprises and technology vendors worldwide are using Shunra's award-winning solutions including 3M, Boeing, Cisco, Dow Chemical, EMC, FedEx, General Electric, General Motors, JPMorgan Chase, Kelly Services, Merrill Lynch, Motorola, Nestle, Pitney Bowes, and Vodafone. Shunra's US headquarters are located in New York City. The Company maintains sales offices throughout North America, the UK, Israel, India and Singapore and supports a global network of distributors. For more information, please visit www.shunra.com.

Shunra is a trademark of Shunra Software Ltd. All other trademarks and registered trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.