You might believe, and with some real justification, that the term “end to end” is only used by vendors who custom-fit the definition to the scope of their particular product.

Does “end-to-end” application management, for instance, include the mainframe? You bet it does if you’re a vendor that manages the mainframe environment! Does it include capturing the end user experience at the end station, desktop, or mobile device? Once again, the answer is a definitive “yes” if you’re a vendor that has strong QoE (Quality of Experience) roots. Or how about insights into the code and design of the application itself? If you’re one of the few vendors that does this, you’re proud of it and wouldn’t have it any other way!

But what if you were to stand the question on its head and ask: What if your executive team needed to develop a true “end-to-end” application management strategy? You would rightly assume that no one vendor is optimized to do it all. And you would be right in realizing that really effective application management requires teaming across various constituencies – application support, data center, service desk, application development and network, as well as business planner and consumer constituencies. In parallel, you would need to combine on vendor architectures and technologies “across silos,” as well.

So if you did all that, then what would it look like?

Well, EMA decided to take on this challenge and collectively (working across practice areas I might add) came up with at least our first iteration of an “End-to-end Application Roadmap.” We tried to define the major technology spheres relevant to this end-to-end challenge. Then we followed it up with some research across a total of more than 400 respondents in two surveys in June of his year that paralleled some complementary network management research in the same month. All this produced what I think are some rather interesting results.

So what are the technology classes that apply to our “end-to-end application roadmap?”

They include:

• Application Integration Analytics – This area is something of a black hole still today. These technologies look at interdependencies across applications and middleware with variable transaction paths. This includes everything from capturing the dynamics between DNS and Microsoft Exchange, and Web 2.0 and SOA application components that may interact in real-time manners, to running requests through MQ Series as an extension of a total application ecosystem.
• Networked Application Management – This area focuses on application flows, including transactions, across the networked, distributed infrastructure and is one of the most active areas of innovation in the market today. It includes a wide variety of technologies to capture performance and response time, as well as volumes and routed directions, to looking potentially at transactions between the data center and the end station.
• Application Code Analytics – This sector of our roadmap targets components within specific applications. It is especially critical for what our data shows to be the number one requirement in many environments – in-house developed applications which don’t come with their own instrumentation and best practices. But it’s important for capturing application behaviors overall.
• Application Dependency Mapping – This is still a new market that helped to generate a lot of interest in, among other things, CMDB System deployments. Application dependency solutions typically provide reasonably dynamic insights. Updates may occur on a 24-hour basis in most cases, or else in "real-time" as changes made to systems-to-application inter-relationships trigger updates to the app dependency software. Most of the vendors in this market, but not all, have been acquired by platform makers. As a group they represent a wide range of technologies, and some include networked application flows with application volume awareness.
• Data Center Analytics – I didn’t name each section as this was an EMA-wide effort. And if it were up to me I would call this “infrastructure management.” It includes many of the most established capabilities for looking across the distributed infrastructure – systems, network, database, etc. – to manage the physical components for performance and availability in terms of historical trending and in real time. Since application performance depends in large part on the health of the infrastructure underneath, this is very much a part of the big picture.