Latest News from Charles Rich

Business Results for the C-Suite: Making an Impact with Application Performance Monitoring

Tue, 08 May 2012 12:59:12 EDT

We’ve said it before and we’re going to say it again: Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is red hot right now. Although it’s a mature market, the capabilities APM brings to the table are only increasing in value throughout the enterprise. … Continue reading →

Making Big Data into Small Data

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 07:15:00 EDT

It isn’t every day you get to write about Immanuel Kant and Big Data in the same blog post but last week Gartner Analyst Will Cappelli did just that. As you’ll see in his post, “AI and IAM: Will Two-Tier … Continue reading →

The best view, is a unified view

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 12:07:31 EDT

Many enterprises utilize middleware as the “glue” linking their application infrastructure together. This application fabric is usually comprised of bespoke and commercial applications, some of which are sourced within the company and others obtained through acquisition. For these enterprises, middleware … Continue reading →

Don’t forget the CIO…he is also a customer

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:04:42 EDT

In 1909, Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge’s department store, coined the phrase “The customer is always right,” and it has become the mantra of countless businesses since. At the time, Gordon could have been considered a customer service … Continue reading →

Sorting Through the APM Clutter

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 03:00:00 EST

Alexander Podelko, a performance expert working with Oracle, recently wrote a blog post in which he takes a look at the current state of the APM market and what he thinks needs to change in order for companies to get … Continue reading →

Bursting Big Data’s Bubble: Playing the Pattern

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 03:00:00 EST

Nastel recently joined a conversation on Infoworld.com around what writer Dan Tynan described as “IT’s worst addictions.” From our perspective, data is one of these addictions, and by far one of the biggest pain points that the IT industry is … Continue reading →

APM is hot right now

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:59:37 EST

A recent article in NetworkWorld highlighted the surge that is being seen in the Application Performance Monitoring space recently. The article came about after AppDynamics and BlueStripe released news that their revenues increased 400 and 700 percent, respectively, in 2011. … Continue reading →

Nastel Named to EMA’s APM Elite

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:47:57 EST

We’re very excited to announce that Enterprise Management Associates has named Nastel Technologies a Value Leader in the latest EMA Radar™ for Application Performance Management (APM) for Cloud Services: Q1 2012 report. Report author and Research Director, Julie Craig, notes … Continue reading →

What a T-shirt and hockey stick have to do with cloud computing

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:54:35 EST

It’s no secret that 2011 saw the adoption rates of cloud computing increase, and 2012 should see even more growth as organizations not only move their critical applications to the cloud, but small and mid-sized businesses begin to request more … Continue reading →

Setting the record straight on APM and DevOps: A response to SD Times

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:39:40 EST

Setting the record straight on APM and DevOps: A response to SD Times by Nastel Technologies Continue reading →

See your way out of the silo and into better application performance

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:02:59 EST

Visibility promotes a clear picture of what is occurring in front of you. Not just on the road, but in the world of IT. Continue reading →

A rose is a rose is a rose is a . . . Nastel AutoPilot

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:27:29 EST

While driving past acres of carefully tended wine grapes on Long Island’s North Fork, I noticed that some vineyards planted a rosebush at the beginning of each row of grape vines. Continue reading →

Is the end-user the problem or the solution in APM?

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:57:32 EST

CA announced CA APM 9.1 earlier this week, and Forrester released analyst JP Garbani’s Market Overview report on APM for Q4. What struck Nastel in both cases was the connection being made between end-user monitoring and Application Performance Monitoring. Continue reading →

The Event Storm is coming…What will you do?

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:05:15 EST

The earlier you find an IT problem the less expensive it is to resolve it. Most IT practitioners would agree with that. What they will most likely disagree about is how to do it. Some talk about predictive monitoring and say they can forecast IT problems before they occur. Can that really be done? Continue reading →

You’ve Got to See It to Believe It

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:43:00 EST

Is it a bird? Well no, but you can tweet about it. Is it a plane? No, but it does go on AutoPilot. Is it Superman? No. But it has super powers that allow organizations to get their business-critical applications running with the highest performance. It’s Nastel’s AutoPilot M6, an application performance management solution, providing enterprises a powerful mechanism for managing the performance of complex composite applications and their transactions. And the award-winning Nastel AutoPilot On-Demand for WebSphere MQ, a solution for self-service access to visibility and diagnostics for WMQ is offered as a free download from the Nastel site. Don’t just take our word for it; see for yourself how the product works by watching the video below.

Seven Ways APM Can Prevent Profit Drain

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:15:00 EST

Routines — we all depend on them. When we don’t, not much gets accomplished. The same can be said of IT. If we don’t establish certain protocols, routines if you will, applications run amok. Business processes are interrupted and the business fails to accomplish its goals. So what makes application performance monitoring (APM) such an important solution for keeping a business flowing smoothly, growing profits, letting everyone go about their normal routines without interruption? APM can prevent profit drainWhen the right application performance management system is doing its job behind the scenes, there are processes which are going on silently that make a tremendous difference. In 2010, 60 percent of the businesses using IT technology were reporting that their lack of APM was draining away 9 percent of their corporate revenues. That was a significant loss of profits.

Architectural Insights for Deploying WMQ

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:18:17 EST

WebSphere MQ 7 is an impressive piece of software. Not only is it easy to install on most platforms, but it is also easy to setup with default options. However, if we look at the options offered to us while setting up Websphere MQ and Queue Managers, we will see a lot of flexibility that can help take advantage of a user's environment. Continue reading →

What’s Behind an AutoPilot Anyhow?

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 12:16:28 EST

"In the early days of aviation, aircraft required the continuous attention of a pilot in order to fly safely," according to information taken from online flight manuals. "As aircraft range increased allowing flights of many hours, the constant attention led to serious fatigue. To remediate this an autopilot is designed to perform some of the tasks of the pilot." Continue reading →

Avoiding the IT Turkey on the Manufacturing Floor

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:17:19 EST

Time is money, and never more so than in the case of a factory that has to run at peak efficiency 24/7/365 to meet production orders. A company will incur millions in costs if manufacturing operations hit the skids. Continue reading →

4 Best practices for Your Black Friday/Cyber Monday Preparations

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 09:00:51 EST

Black Friday is just the beginning of that time of year when most businesses finally start to turn a genuine profit. The business your IT department supports is depending on you to keep the sales process flowing smoothly and swiftly. What practices can you put in place today to ensure your mission-critical applications stay up and running throughout the busy holiday shopping season? Continue reading →

Elasticity – Have You Overlooked Its Importance to APM?

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 10:30:00 EST

When it comes to business, no one outside IT cares about how you deliver consistent, dependable service — as long as you do it…and do it inexpensively. Customers want a no-pain, no-problem experience at the checkout stand or internet shopping cart. The business wants to prevent customer attrition and order fallout by keeping them happy. They also need to be able grow without the expansion revealing inadequacies in the IT enterprise. Application performance monitoring (APM) is a recognized solution for keeping the pain of growth to a minimum and for identifying problems before they impact end users. Accomplishing this before users are impacted keeps the costs down. When your APM solution is also elastic, it can fulfill these roles even more effectively.

Will You Be Blacking Out on Black Friday?

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 09:00:18 EST

Last year, Black Friday website traffic broke records. It was up 13 percent from the previous year and proved to be the single biggest sales day for website traffic for all of 2010. Will this critical kick-off day for the 2011 holiday season catch your IT system by surprise? And will you be ready to handle all that traffic, both online and off? Continue reading →

Need More Network Visibility to Troubleshoot Application Performance Effectively?

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:08:52 EST

When you monitor the availability and performance of your organization’s mission critical applications do you get all the information you need about the network to troubleshoot effectively? Continue reading →

Nothin’ But .NET?

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 06:00:00 EST

With all the applications .NET allows you to create—from customer relationship management and product inventory applications to websites and cloud partnerships, to name just a few, you can't afford for your .NET applications to go down. It could cost millions in lost revenue directly through lost orders or sales, and indirectly through lost consumer confidence. Continue reading →

Is Your APM Solution Tricking or Treating You?

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 06:00:20 EST

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is promoted as the best way to keep all the applications that serve your business available and performing properly. Though when it comes to the main IT challenges your business faces, you may be wondering if all the talk isn't just hype. Continue reading →

Nastel Receives More Recognition as a Leader in APM

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:56:00 EST

It’s not often that we like to give ourselves a pat on the back, but when we feel it’s deserving, well then we do it. Therefore, Nastel was named a Bronze-level winner in the Best in Biz awards in the Enterprise Product of the Year category. The winners were announced this week. Nastel is honored to have been included among the many prestigious companies that also received high marks and praise, namely Scandisk, Hubspan, Pure Storage and Spigit, which all competed in Nastel’s category. This is a fantastic accomplishment for Nastel and further showcases our expertise in the application performance monitoring space. This is a testament to the countless hours, hard work and dedication of our employees, from our developers and support teams, to our sales and marketing department. This is the second award we’ve collected since August – the other being the Best APM Solution awarded by the Golden Bridge Awards – and it is in large part due to the dedication of these employees to create and sell solutions that provide enterprises the ability to continue on with business, uninterrupted.

Tell that customer service rep, “it’s not the computer, it’s the app”

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:57:34 EST

When my children were younger, they used to call my monitor the “computer”. To them, this was the interface they saw and what went on behind it was not something obvious to them. They were simply naïve and unaware of … Continue reading →

Thinking of Moving Your Applications to the Cloud? Consider This

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 10:45:00 EDT

There is no escaping cloud computing. Every software package, service and even hardware is described as cloud-enabled. Seemingly, we are all headed into the clouds never to return. However, while the atmosphere is everywhere, the cloud decidedly is not. It is by definition remote – so if your applications require the highest in performance, cloud may not be the answer. Not all applications will completely move to the cloud. In some cases this will be by design and the type of application, while others won’t be able to avoid migration pitfalls. For the percentage of business-critical applications that require the highest performance and have the most sensitive information and complexity of process, a hybrid model of cloud services to bridge the datacenter, branch offices and trading partners is best. In these instances, the transport time or latency between local applications and those in the cloud may be too much for certain purposes to allow for a standard cloud implementation.

M&A – Merging Your Acquired IT Management Tools

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:38:00 EDT

Good news: Your company has just gone through a merger. But surprise, surprise: you have also acquired a whole new set of management tools, along with a whole new set of applications. Also included, at no charge is a fresh set of application problems. Oh boy. Continue reading →

Childhood Games Form the Basis of Transaction Stitching

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 12:49:09 EDT

Building puzzles requires identifying the location of each piece. One usually starts with the pieces whose location is most obvious, the corners, and then the process of building the puzzle proceeds by finding the pieces next to these corner pieces, and so on. Usually, people work on one puzzle at a time....This process is similar to how transactions are stitched together. Except instead of a manual, user-driven process this is done through automation.... Continue reading →

What Does Your IT Department Fear This Holiday Season?

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:12:36 EDT

Unfortunately for IT departments, there's nothing profitable in the ghouls and ghosts that haunt their systems. They aren't make-believe. They are very real fears. Continue reading →

Lessons from the Harvest Moon for IT CIOs – Are You Leveraging Extra Light?

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 19:19:18 EDT

When America was a more agricultural country, the October harvest moon was very important for every farmer. Two nights of full moon gave the farmer enough visibility to continue harvesting the crops before winter’s chill and stormy weather robbed them … Continue reading →

Is Your Application Environment Poised for Growth?

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 14:04:52 EDT

Many businesses are struggling today under the weight of their IT business applications. The business cannot survive without the applications that enable the essential tasks of business—keeping accurate inventories, processing payments, handling orders—to name just a few. While the activities may be the same as they were hundreds of years ago, the volume at which these transactions occur is too vast for any mind (except a savant's) to comprehend. The sheer volume of transactions handled by a retail store wit Continue reading →

On any given Sunday, football teaches a lesson on why monitoring your investment is critical to success

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 09:05:22 EDT

“Fourth down and inches from the goal line, I’m wondering what they’re going to do here?” asks the play-by-play announcer. Continue reading →

Sometimes you need to know where you’ve been to see where you’re going

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:14:28 EDT

I recently accompanied a member of the Nastel sales team to a prospective client and our conversation focused on the opportunity to use AutoPilot for better visibility into the company’s applications. Currently this company employs a variety of monitoring solutions to gather information on application performance, and while they’re getting the visibility they want, I pointed out that AutoPilot would simplify their efforts. Continue reading →

What Do You Know About Application Performance Management?

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:00:31 EDT

Do you know as much about application performance management as you think you do? Take the following quiz to find out. It's only five questions long, so it won't take much of your time. Continue reading →

The True Costs When IT Is Silo, Not Application Centric

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 06:30:00 EDT

The development of IT environments have naturally led to complexity. Put it down to the very nature of capitalism. Different vendors working together to achieve a common goal isn’t a common occurrence. Each vendor has over the years developed its own monitoring and reporting systems. This is all well and good for each specific application or system. It doesn’t work effectively when applications are executing across an IT enterprise comprised of everything from mainframe to cloud. Many of these cost are so ingrained into the IT system they aren’t perceived for the real impact they actually make on the business’ bottom line. For example, how much does it cost to maintain the service desk? If customers are submitting more help tickets than IT is catching ahead of time, then the business is losing money through the service desk.

No Fragile, “Cobbled” Solution Need Apply

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:39:00 EDT

The number of vendors vying for the application performance management space has exploded in the last year. Almost every vendor in the space comes to it from a specific strength and has expanded its core offering to provide some level … Continue reading →

BTM – The Lime in APM’s Limeade

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 09:00:26 EDT

Application performance management is a lot like limeade. If you don't have all the ingredients present you don't have APM. You have separate ingredients that provide value on their own. Just as limes can be used for things other than limeade, the separate dimensions that can be combined to provide an application performance monitoring/management solution may also be beneficial to a business as a stand-alone product. Continue reading →

Who Knew New APM Software Could Be This Sweet?

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 09:00:53 EDT

I remember watching my grandmother make "real" fudge from scratch in her kitchen when I was a kid. The recipe had five ingredients. Sugar, cocoa, milk, salt and cream of tartar. All she needed was one pan, heat and a candy thermometer. Continue reading →

Interview with David Mavashev, founder and CEO of Nastel Technologies

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 12:02:22 EDT

We have the opportunity today to speak with David Mavashev, founder and CEO of Nastel Technologies, on his view of the APM (Application Performance Management) market. David, do you think “APM” is a subject that’s clear for most IT professionals, or is there confusion in the marketplace? Continue reading →

We’ll be there, will you?

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 18:10:10 EDT

Come and visit Nastel at Gartner Symposium in Orlando October 16-20. We will be in booth #427 - daily contests, become a fan of Nastel on Facebook and win a t-shirt Continue reading →

Middleware is often neglected, but is no less important

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 19:10:41 EDT

In families with an odd number of children there is always one child caught in the middle. The first born is typically the leader, while the youngest is usually the more adventurous of the children because the parents have been … Continue reading →

You don’t have to be Columbus to make a discovery! Oh where in the world are my queue manager objects?

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 09:01:06 EDT

When Columbus sailed the ocean-blue in 1492, he set out to discover the Indies and accidentally discovered the Americas. Like the old lady who lived in a shoe, he had ‘so many troubles he didn’t know what to do.’ Disease, a near mutinous crew, Native Americans he couldn’t communicate with, broken rudders, and a shipwreck. Exploring your WebSphere MQ network world need not be such a hazardous journey. Continue reading →

Code reuse, why copy/paste is the enemy!

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:49:22 EDT

I had to fix a loose railing on the deck, so I took out my trusty cordless drill/driver and a couple of screws, and presto, tested and fixed. The following week I had to fix a loose section of fence in my yard, so I took out the same gadget, along with longer screws that required a different driver bit. Now I could have went out and bought another drill/driver because I needed to use a different bit, but why do that when I had one that already works, all I needed to do was change the bit, right? Continue reading →

Get to the heart of the APM matter

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 09:05:57 EDT

Recently, I was at a drug store that offers free blood pressure screening at a self-service kiosk. Being somewhat curious, I took the opportunity to play with the machine and see what it was all about. Continue reading →

Exciting times these are at Nastel

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 12:49:10 EDT

The second quarter has passed and with it Nastel has witnessed an exceptional period of growth over the first half of 2011. The growth not only is being seen in dollars and cents, but in personnel, products and customer wins. Continue reading →

Still not sold on APM? You need to look to the stars for the answer

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 09:02:40 EDT

This week we witnessed the final landing of the Space Shuttle Atlantis and the end, for now, of U.S. manned space missions. Sending the shuttle to space requires over 1 million pounds of propellant and 500,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to boost the 4.4 million pound machine into orbit. Talk about an engineering feat beyond all others! But we at Nastel Technologies are not in the business of sending vehicles into space; we’re in the business of providing solutions for application performance management. So while knowing how much fuel it takes to travel into orbit, how much heat the sensitive tiles on each shuttle can withstand, or how the payload doors are designed is intriguing, we’d rather hear about the real guts of NASA’s shuttle program, the software applications that bring it all together, how they’re monitored and how diagnostics are provided when something is about to go wrong. Continue reading →

“Hey, are they related” – DNA Testing for Transactions

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 09:54:20 EDT

Ever look at a two people and ask, “Are they related? They have to be siblings!” One sure way to determine if two people are in fact siblings is to compare their DNA. The same scenario can also be applied to transaction monitoring. Continue reading →

AutoPilot Featured in NetworkWorld

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 05:30:38 EDT

Each week NetworkWorld provides its readers a snapshot of newest and exciting products in the IT space. This week Nastel found its new product, AutoPilot for Cloud SaaS Edition, included among the other offerings. Continue reading →