Mind Your Transactions When Times are Tight

These days, it’s more important than ever to ensure your business systems work like they’re supposed to. For starters, customers are harder to come by. They’re pickier, too, since they’ve got a wide range of bargain-basement options. The slightest glitch in your system and your competitor gets the business, not you. Simply put, you can’t afford to have unreliable systems.

It’s pretty clear how transaction failures affect your bottom line. Shopping carts lose their contents, accounts fail to be provisioned, orders are lost and packages become untraceable. Not good. And remember, it doesn’t matter one bit to your customers why, how or where the error occurred. All they know is they weren’t served well.

Modern application architectures are becoming increasingly brittle. With interconnected, multi-tier applications running in virtualized environments, isolated failures, errors or slowdowns can have a dramatic impact on the overall system. It’s tedious and expensive to locate and repair these issues. Your teams waste countless hours searching through log files or looking at multiple consoles in order to piece together the problem and its root cause.

One of our customers met this issue head on. A Fortune 100 financial services company that’s one of the largest, most complex transaction-oriented organizations in the world. A single business unit within the bank processes 780,000 transactions per day, spread over 3,500 distributed nodes. The Senior Development Manager had this to say:

“The risk for our application is enormous. In our business, with the nervousness of the market, perception is key. Even with 30 minutes of downtime costing 100,000 Euros, our face to the street is much, much more important than transactional dollars.”

This customer was facing a huge challenge in pinpointing application problems because processes and transactions were dispersed across thousands of blade servers throughout the data center.

Business Transaction Management addresses these pain points. Done the right way, it provides visibility into every transaction flowing from start to finish across the environment. It detects slowdowns and failures and notifies you immediately of the problem. And it pinpoints the source of the transaction failure so you can quickly remedy the situation.

For more on this topic, have a look at our analyst report on Business Transaction Management. It gives more information on the Fortune 100 company I described here.