DynaTrace Improves APM Breadth, Depth And Ease Of Use

Less than two weeks after being acquired by Compuware, DynaTrace Software is refreshing its application performance management (APM) platform with a new release offering improved breadth, depth and ease of use.

Depending upon the definition, the APM market is worth anywhere from $1.65 billion (Gartner) to more than $18 billion (IDC) annually, says John Van Siclen, president of Compuware’s DynaTrace subsidiary, which puts the market at $6 billion annually. DynaTrace took in $26 million in the last 12 months, and it is growing at a rate of 80% to 100% year over year, while Compuware says its annual APM revenues are in the hundreds of millions and growing, about 30% to 40% a year.

The first new release in two years, DynaTrace 4 is powered by the next generation of the company's transaction tracing capability, PurePath Technology, as well as the first stage of integration with Gomez, the web application experience management solution Compuware acquired in late 2009. Van Siclen says it is the most sophisticated release yet, offering not only increased enterprise-class functionality but also extensive automation and analytics to make it easier to use.

"This is a great combination of power and simplicity," he says, and it's perfect timing with the Compuware acquisition. The initial integration with Gomez involves its Synthetic Monitoring and Web Load Testing capabilities. "We believe in the concept that applications are living organisms, constantly changing, so you need a lifecycle approach. So with the production monitoring of Gomez as well as their cloud-based test facility, any Gomez transaction can now be mapped to DynaTrace."

Van Siclen expects the new release to appeal primarily to existing APM customers, as well as for new greenfield opportunities. "I think the biggest opportunity will be for those customers who have spent money on APM and now realize they're in a dead end." He says prior to the acquisition, DynaTrace was getting two-thirds of its business from swap-outs from other vendors' APM customers.

Compuware-Gomez already shook up the market by providing several forms of end user experience monitoring, says Jean-Pierre Garbani, VP and principal analyst, Forrester Research. "What DynaTrace brings is two things: the ability to trace individual transactions, so facilitating the investigation into potential transaction problems, and the ability to go deep into the Java EE application itself. Although this does not seem to be new, we think that DynaTrace is a second-generation Java EE monitoring solution, as it is non-intrusive compared to the first-generation solutions that were using byte code instrumentation."

Garbani says Gomez (as Compuware APM is now known) is a power solution that provides unique features: It has the breadth of large APM vendors, covers all bases of monitoring (end user, infrastructures and applications), brings the vision from the external and mobile user, and finally has an up-to-date tracing and Java monitoring solution. "I think the big opportunity is against the installed bases of CA, HP and IBM. and potentially Quest Software."

Due to ship in the second half of August, DynaTrace 4 has an entry point in the $20,000 to $30,000 range, depending on configuration, and can scale up to six figures for large implementations.

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