VSM: Tell me about eG Innovations. What does the company do?
SR: eG Innovations provides performance management solutions that ensure user productivity and reliable delivery of mission-critical business services in cloud, virtual, and physical IT environments. Where traditional monitoring tools fail to provide actionable insight into causes of service issues, eG Innovations delivers total performance visibility across every layer and every tier of the service infrastructure. From desktops to applications, and from network to storage, eG Innovations dramatically accelerates the discovery, diagnosis and resolution of performance and user experience issues - before they impact user productivity and the success of transformational IT initiatives. Our award-winning solutions are trusted by the world's most demanding companies to deliver on the ROI promise of transformational IT investments, and keep business services up and running.
VSM: Which markets are served by eG Innovations?
SR: eG Innovations customers range from the Global 1,000 to medium-size businesses and industries such as financial services, healthcare, technology, manufacturing, government and many more.
VSM: What are the challenges that emerging next-generation, dynamic IT infrastructures pose in terms of application performance expectations – specifically the cloud?
SR: Transformational IT technologies like virtual servers, desktops and cloud computing offer enterprises significant operational and cost benefits, but at the same time, they make management of business services operating on these infrastructures more complex and challenging. Traditional monitoring tools are neither equipped to manage the additional layers of abstraction nor can they handle the new and dynamic nature of inter-dependencies that these technologies introduce. The difficulty in making virtualized environments perform directly impacts business processes, customer satisfaction and business continuity.
VSM: What is the biggest problem companies experience when deploying virtual desktops?
SR: One of the biggest challenges is user acceptance. Today, users expect their virtual desktops to perform as well as a physical system and they won't tolerate slow applications. So if applications become too slow, VDI implementations will stall. Scalability is an issue with IT. Fixing performance issues downstream is costly and won't scale; and it is almost impossible to pinpoint problems quickly. Additionally, complexity is an enormous issue. Add virtual machines, connection broker, profile server, provisioning server and there is a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong and impact the user experience.
VSM: How does eG Innovations' product, eG Enterprise solution, solve this problem?
SR: eG Innovations implements a best practices approach to performance management that will alleviate these challenges.
We build performance assurance into VDI infrastructure from the beginning to mitigate the risk of VDI failure downstream. By doing this, customers avoid costly ad hoc fixes and we can ensure scalability and deliver ROI. We also deploy based on best practices for VDI management. Proper monitoring of VDI service and users across all infrastructure components to manage service performance end-to-end instead of silos, right-sizing the infrastructure to avoid over-provisioning and ensure ROI, preemptive detection and alerting ensuring deep visibility into user sessions - each contribute to a successful implementation and the ongoing management of VDI.
VSM: What's the most important issue in application monitoring – user experience, performance or transaction management?
SR: User experience, performance and transaction management are all linked together. By monitoring users and not just virtual machines you ensure that services are running at peak performance and users are satisfied. The old silo approach of managing each infrastructure stack autonomously doesn't work in today's complex, interdependent and dynamic environments. It just leads to fingerpointing, frustrated users, frustrated IT staff and interrupted business processes.
eG Innovations provides deep performance visibility into every layer and every VDI tier across the entire service. Because of this, it is possible to quickly and accurately diagnose complex VDI performance issues. We can even provide IT with granular insight into each user session on each server to better understand usage patterns and resolve the most difficult issues with ease. This approach lets administrators see and fix problems before users notice a slowdown in service performance.
VSM: How are eG Innovations' products innovative compared to competitors?
SR: eG Innovations, with its patent-pending virtualization-aware and cloud-aware correlation and automated root-cause diagnosis technology, is uniquely capable of tackling the monitoring and performance management challenges that transformational cloud and virtualization technologies introduce. eG's solutions offer end-to-end performance visibility across every layer and every tier of dynamic service infrastructures - from desktops to applications and from network to storage, and provide actionable insights into the true causes of cross-domain service performance issues. Traditional platforms cant provide this level of automation, visibility and speed when it comes to keeping systems at peak performance.
VSM: What does 2012 look like for the virtualization market?
SR: Transformational IT technologies, like desktop and server virtualization and cloud computing, will continue to change the way IT services are provisioned and delivered. While these technologies offer significant operational and cost benefits, they make management of business services operating on these new and dynamic infrastructures much more complex and challenging. Because of these factors, we're seeing performance management practices and solutions undergoing dramatic change as IT tries to deal with these new technologies and challenges.
At eG Innovations we're seeing IT professionals really focused on better understanding root cause analysis – for example – where is the real problem when a user says “my computer is slow”? More IT pros are looking at solutions that can help them determine the real cause when a user says “my computer is slow.”
Additionally, we're going to see a reduction in the number of siloed performance monitoring tools (one for the network, one for the server, one for the database, etc.) as vendors bring solutions to market that provide an answer to cross-layer performance analysis.
Solving the root cause analysis problem is something the industry is moving toward, and in 2012 this issue will continue to be top of mind with IT.