Would You Plan Your Failures?

Last week’s sales kick­off in Orlando, com­bined with our (Progress’) acqui­si­tion of Savvion, and my deliv­ery of the keynote solu­tion sales pitch (broad­cast to the entire com­pany) has left my head spin­ning. I’ve got a few posts in mind, but mostly have a real inter­est in blog­ging more.

I fig­ure, best way to start is to start, and let the details work them­selves out.

I real­ized dur­ing one of my ses­sions, that I’m get­ting kinda pre­dictable. Every time I dis­cuss Actional with the field, I harp on the same issue…

Auto­matic vis­i­bil­ity.

Yeah, it’s the “auto­matic” part of that phrase that’s the impor­tant part. Other com­pa­nies that pro­vide some level of Busi­ness Trans­ac­tion Man­age­ment talk about vis­i­bil­ity, but can’t tell you when some­thing hap­pens that you weren’t expect­ing (in terms of which appli­ca­tions are using which ser­vices). [For another view of BTM, check out OpTier’s per­spec­tive…]

I asked the audi­ence how many peo­ple would plan in such a way that their sys­tems failed? Not sur­pris­ingly, no one raised their hands. Who wants a fail­ure to occur? Yet they do. And, they do because things that we didn’t know about our envi­ron­ment happen.

There­fore, it becomes impor­tant, and dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing, for a Busi­ness Trans­ac­tion Man­age­ment solu­tion to be able to tell us things that we didn’t oth­er­wise know. That is, it’s impor­tant for those solu­tions to be auto­matic in how they dis­cover what’s going on in the environment.

Let me give you a real example…

This sort of thing hap­pened to me in sev­eral sit­u­a­tions, but I always think of UMC in Tai­wan in the year that Actional was the merged com­pany of Actional and West­Bridge (roughly 2005) when I tell the story. I installed Actional in the cus­tomers pre-production envi­ron­ment, and we started to dis­play net­work overview unique to Actional that shows the inter-relationships between sys­tems dynam­i­cally drawn based on actual mes­sage traf­fic between ser­vices. All of a sud­den, and machine popped up in the top right cor­ner of the screen. The cus­tomer, in his bro­ken Eng­lish, asked “what’s that?”

Well, it so hap­pened that the host­name was “biztalk…”, so I knew it was a BizTalk server, and I iden­ti­fied the caller, the process being called in BizTalk, the call­ing appli­ca­tion, etc, all the while show­ing him the UI and how he’d find that infor­ma­tion using the product.

My turn to ask a ques­tion, I asked “why are you ask­ing about that system?”

His response: “Well, that’s our pro­duc­tion BizTalk Server on our man­u­fac­tur­ing floor. I need to go.”

He needed to go and head off what could poten­tially be a major pro­duc­tion dis­rup­tion with a big busi­ness impact. When he returned about 15 min­utes later, we used Actional to con­firm that he had suc­cess­fully shut the pro­duc­tion sys­tem out from his pre-production sys­tems and that there was no longer any risk that some pre-production test might take down his man­u­fac­tur­ing facility.

You see, there are all sorts of rules/policies for mak­ing sure this stuff doesn’t hap­pen… but with a tool like Actional you can be sure that those rules are work­ing properly.

Before you blame this on an uncom­mon “process” fail­ure, and think this was a rare event that I was lucky to capture…

Fri­day, we had the tech­ni­cal field together for a day of train­ing, and I got to ask another ques­tion. This time, I had peo­ple raise their hands if they’ve installed Actional at a cus­tomer. Best guess, about 80 peo­ple raised their hands. Keep­ing their hands up, I asked…

“How many of you found stuff in your cus­tomers envi­ron­ment that they didn’t know was happening?”

Only two peo­ple put their hands down.

We know our cus­tomers need vis­i­bil­ity, but that’s an incred­i­bly pow­er­ful tes­ta­ment to the need for it to be automatic.

PS — I have an old pre­sen­ta­tion with 3 case stud­ies on vis­i­bil­ity. Email me if you’re inter­ested, and I’ll send it over.