Compuware Introduces New APM Tools For Mobile, Web And Enterprise Apps

Application performance management tools vendor Compuware introduced a suite of new products for monitoring the performance of applications, particularly those delivered increasingly to mobile devices. The company also announced that it will be integrating its tools with Google Page Speed, a free, open source tool for improving application speeds, and it would be rebranding its legacy Vantage products as Gomez, referring to a line of tools it gained in the acquisition of Gomez Inc. in the fall of 2009.

The updated Gomez platform includes what Compuware says are new industry-first features, including "real-user monitoring," which enables organizations to understand the actual performance end-users are experiencing when using native mobile applications or accessing websites from mobile devices.

Google Page Speed allows an application developer or manager to test their app by running it in Page Speed and get feedback from Google on how to improve the app to make it run faster. "[Google's] contention is that a faster Internet is better for everybody, consumers and suppliers," said Eric Schurr, senior vice president of marketing at Compuware.

The integration with Google Page Speed is a particularly smart move for Compuware, said Jonah Kowall, research director for IT operations research at Gartner. Integrating Page Speed with Compuware's APM tools is akin to Web sites incorporating Google Maps. "Compuware is the first to provide this feature to the APM market, showing their innovation in this new domain of integrating 3rd party services into enterprise APM offerings," Kowall wrote in an e-mail.

Slow applications discourage people from using apps, particularly mobile Web apps, Schurr said, so the new Gomez platform includes a feature called Real-User Monitoring Performance Conversion Analytics, which analyzes the business impact of slow applications. Buying a product on an e-commerce site is a multi-step process, from shopping to buying to paying to shipping; a bottleneck anywhere can cause people to abandon their shopping carts.The Analytics feature "correlates web site performance to the abandonment rate and pinpoints where in the process performance issues cause people to abandon carts," he said. "It's because [the apps] are too slow."

Compuware decided to drop the Vantage brand and rename all its APM tools with the Gomez name to convey to the market the unification and integration of all of these products that now serve the data center and Web app market. Vantage is Compuware's legacy data center APM product line while Gomez is its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Web APM line. Compuware settled on Gomez because mobile, Web-based apps are poised for growth as consumers and enterprise employees increasingly rely on mobile devices for computing purposes, Schurr said.

While other APM vendors also offer mobile app monitoring tools, Compuware does have some advantages, Kowall said, such as its High-Volume Load-Testing Agent, which tests how an application performs when it is being heavily used. "With the explosive growth of mobile devices this will become a more critical area of focus of application development," he said.

Compuware was in the coveted leaders quadrant in Gartner's 2010 APM Magic Quadrant, along with competitors CA, HP and Quest Software. The 2011 APM report is due out yet this quarter. The APM market was roughly $1.65 billion  in 2010, up from $1.58 billion in 2009 and the lion's share of that market is in distributed APM software as opposed to software that runs on a mainframe computer.

See more on this topic by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports Strategy: Calculating APM Costs (subscription required).