Application performance management is a priority for IT staff in 2012 as end user numbers grow and demand for better services shoots up. However, research by Quocirca has shown that IT executives, particularly CIOs, are not confident that they will be able to meet increasing user demand...

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Because it leverages advanced pattern detection algorithms, Prelert is more likely to catch the early warning signs of an impending performance incident. Here's how it works.  

Most predictive analytics packages rely on regression analysis to look at trending metrics and project a future event.  Of course this works best when there is a steady progressive increase or decrease in a metric that can easily be extrapolated to a future threshold.

Prelert, on the other hand, learns the normal patterns of activity in a monitored environment and uses a 'heat map' dashboard to highlight anomalies in those patterns.  In nearly ...

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The Chicago Police Department turbocharged their detective work by putting in action an advanced pattern-recognition software system. Created by computer scientists at DePaul University, Classification System for Serial Criminal Patterns (CSSCP) uses artificial intelligence to cull massive amounts of data.

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Amazon Web Services last April suffered what many consider to be the worst cloud service outage to date - an event that knocked big name customers such as Reddit, Foursquare, HootSuite, Quora and others offline, some for as many as four days. Are we any safer today?

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Hillary Martin, Chief Scientist for Bit.ly says that it seems that the markets are as much in love with "Big Data"—the ability to acquire, process and sort vast quantities of data in real time—as the technology industry. However, according to a report published last year by McKinsey, there is a problem. "A significant constraint on realizing value from Big Data will be a shortage of talent, particularly of people with deep expertise in statistics and machine learning, and the managers and analysts who know how to operate companies by using insights from Big Data,"...

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Mike Sargent, general manager, Enterprise Management, CA Technologies said, “We are pleased to be working with Prelert to provide our customers with a new dimension of predictive management so they can easily attain even higher levels of IT operations efficiencies that drive better business outcomes.”

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Click through the slideshow attached to this story to see who is hiring and what types of jobs are being filled in the San Jose, San Francisco-Peninsula, East Bay and Santa Cruz regions...

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Gartner's Will Capelli has a new blog (AI in IAM) where he explores the role of artificial intelligence in Infrastructure and Application Management. In a recent post he points out the trend toward two tiered analytics. In the first tier application and infrastructure monitoring tools structure the data in the dimensions of time and relationship within the IT architecture.  In the second tier products like Prelert use predictive analysis and machine learning techniques to uncover behavior patterns that IT can use to improve operational efficiency and reduce service incidents.  With Will's usual flair, he relates this approach to ...

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"The complex application environments behind today’s on-line services pose a Big Data problem for the IT teams that support them. There is simply too much data for humans to efficiently process,” explains Mark Jaffe, Prelert CEO. “Prelert provides the industry’s only predictive analytics solution that is fully selflearning, installs in hours and immediately exposes powerful insights currently hidden in overwhelming volumes of data. We are excited to continue working with a leader in enterprise management solutions as we expand support for additional CA Technologies solutions”...

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The optimizm is a bit more pronounced when you see it expressed in the graphic below, which I grabbed from raw survey results. More than two-thirds of the CIOs surveyed said they planned to boost their overall IT spend this year, most of them by a modest 1-5 percent, but some by more than 10 percent...

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The most famous cloud spot market today is Amazon's Spot Instances, where users can set the maximum amount they are willing to pay per server hour, and Amazon gives them an instance for as long as the instance price is below that limit. By taking a quick look at the pricing table on the link above, it is possible to see that the prices are much lower than the price of a full instance...

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One sign that this is a correct prognostication will be the success of alliances between performance monitoring vendors delivering CEP or SDB functionality (e.g., ExtraHop, Nastel, Optier) with vendors that focus on discovering causal patterns in existing data sets (e.g., Prelert, Verdande, Netuititve.)...

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Somewhere in between the foggy mists of management consultancy jargon and the babbling verbiage of business analytics specialists there may, quite possibly, lay an untouched land where real business change discussions take place. The problem with business change and IT innovation is that it too often succumbs to the hijacked efforts of non-technical management figures who fail to understand the real issues at the coalface of application transformation, IT performance management and data optimization...

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It's got 300 customers including plums like the City of Los Angeles, Facebook, Twitter, Flextronics, Home Depot, Japan Post Network, L'Oreal, NetApp, New York University, Starbucks, Thomson Reuters and VMware. It may be the largest single round investment ever put in a cloud start-up. At least Appirio thinks so...

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You no doubt are somewhat cynical about service level agreements (SLAs), those little-reviewed documents that promise the level of service from your hosting provider. Little-read that is, until something goes awry. Enter SingleHop, a Chicago-based provider that is trying to make a name for itself by actually delivering a solid "Bill of Rights" for customers and promising to pay when they don't meet their SLA. It is an interesting idea. Sponsor There are lots of other providers that do offer payouts for missed service milestones, of course. But I liked the way they are making it easy to see ... (Read Full Article)

It didn't take long for infrastructure and operation managers to realize that the traditional silo approach wasn't sufficient anymore, and that APM had to adapt to the new service-oriented model. To put it in context, who is to blame if a company has a typical multitier architecture, with monitoring tools reporting 99.999% availability at each layer, yet the customer continues to experience service interruption? Now, more than ever before, it is important for IT to deliver on continued service excellence, end-to-end, knowing exactly what effect an interruption in one layer has on the overall service to the ...

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Data Center Infrastructure Management -- or DCIM -- is on everyone’s minds these days, and for good reason. According to Forrester Research, DCIM is expected to grow to 60 percent market penetration by 2014, up from just one percent market penetration in 2010. While I’m often skeptical about industry prognostications, the following major trends out there that will fuel DCIM adoption are undeniable...

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Another three-letter acronym I see frequently mixed in with APM is NPM which stands for Network Performance Management. At first glance they look very similar. The distinction appears very subtle with just a one letter difference, but it speaks volumes because their core technologies and approaches to monitoring application performance are fundamentally different...

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A major and rapidly evolving area of focus of this energy is the application of predictive analytics to anticipate and solve tough business and operational problems that threaten the quality of delivered services...

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Operational complexity in virtualized, scale-out, and cloud environments and composite Web-based applications will drive demand for automated analytic performance management and optimization tools that can quickly discover, filter, correlate, remediate, and ideally prevent performance and availability slowdowns, outages, and other service-interrupting incidents...

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Last month, Cisco published a survey that found many IT and HR departments have started considering encouraging the BYOD trend, among others, as competitive advantages when hiring young professionals, in particular. However, this might actually be a myth, according to a new study published by Avanade, a business technology solutions and managed services provider... (Read Full Article)

You've heard of 'The Sh*t Girls Say' and 'The Sh*t Guys Say'. You've gotta see 'The Sh*t IT End Users Say'. Hilarious and well worth the 2 minute run time (Read Full Article)

Given the surge in client interest lately in adopting and exploiting the technology and business benefits of hybrid cloud computing, I’m predicting 2012 will be the Year of Hybrid Cloud. Client-driven requirements will grow more aggressive and will link closer to measures of business agility and cost efficiency... (Read Full Article)

Certainly, the business world at large is interested in the benefits of the cloud, but enterprises have been very slow to adopt a key element of cloud computing: platform-as-a-service or PaaS. For the business world to fully embrace the cloud, they have to overcome a huge hurdle –getting their “core”/legacy/custom-developed applications to the cloud. This is where PaaS comes into play. PaaS provides the necessary cloud capabilities that allow enterprises to fully embrace custom application development through lowered infrastructure costs, less strain on existing resources and the ability to push IT to innovate rather than maintain. The primary ... (Read Full Article)