What do you do when your transaction profiling category vanishes?

One of the more suicidal moves you can commit as a marketer is to declare your category dead. But what happens if it just vanishes?

Last week, Gartner released their 2011 Hype Cycle for IT Operations. After five years of gradually ascending the hype cycle, my category (Application Transaction Profiling) vanished. What happened? We fought hard to gain that 12cm over the last 4 years. That’s an 11% CAGR (over 4 years) that just vaporized at the stroke of a pen!

Then I realized that Gartner did what I’d always hoped they would do and what most CIOs wish big vendors would do – incorporate transaction monitoring as one of the three key capabilities of an application performance monitoring system (the other two are end user monitoring and deep dive component monitoring).

Here’s why Gartner is bang on. People who run applications care about three things:

1. Is the end user’s experience good?
2. Are all the components of the application operating properly?
3. All transactions moving properly between all the components of the application?

Now, not many vendors do the third very well, especially across diverse application architectures, and outsourced environments. So, it’s a bit sad to see Application Transaction Profiling disappear from the Hype Cycle this year. But, it’s better for customers in the long run because it reflects what they want: an Application Performance Monitoring system that answers all three questions well.

And if you ever want to know who does Application Transaction Profiling really well, without duplicating any of the other two capabilities, we’ve got the answer.