Monthly Archives: March 2012

Changes to User Interface

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AppFirst is proud to share the background behind the new look and feel of the AppFirst User Interface.

Why did we change it?
We thought it was time for a fresh, new look. But more importantly, we wanted to make
using your page, and seeing your data, easier and more efficient than ever before.

What was Changed?                                                                                                           In order to maximize the efficiency of pages, we created one clean, clear main menu bar and did away with subtabs. With this approach everything you need is now just one click away. Additionally, we moved Alerts into the Administration Tab in order to streamline the administrative duties, and came up with three new themes.

Themes? Tell me more!                                                                                                   We wanted our customers to be able to personalize and create a page that works for them. Colors templates are available in gray, dark blue, and in a dark blue with tabs options. Each themes adjusts the colors and feel of the page, but keeps the focus where it matters: on your data.

What do we think?
We think the new design makes it easier and smoother to navigate. But what we think doesn’t matter: we would love to know how you, the customers, feel about the new look and function of the User Interface. Comment here or email support@appfirst.com with your likes and dislikes and we’ll keep using your feedback to make AppFirst even better!

AppFirst Unveils New Initiatives to Deliver Business and IT Alignment

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Business and System Risk Management Solutions Bring IT to the Executive Roundtable

NEW YORK, NY – March 26, 2012 – Responding to the growing need for CIOs to deliver a customer-obsessed technology model, AppFirst, provider of critical business and system visibility solutions, today announced three new initiatives to support an organizations’ move to completely align business and IT goals. The new programs are built upon AppFirst’s platform and solutions, which enable IT to integrate business performance and system metrics into a single repository. With that capability, organizations are impacted in powerful ways: by sharing insights about customers, engaging the organization to innovate at the most grassroots level, executing to bring that innovation to market; and resolving issues before their customers even know there is a problem.

The three new initiatives support the progression from a survival mode model where the business is just reacting to users complaining about systems, to a completely aligned organization where business and IT work hand-in-hand to manage those risks.
“Today it’s no longer good enough to be customer-focused – to survive, let alone be successful, you must be customer-obsessed,” said David Roth, AppFirst CEO. “IT is the solution to becoming obsessed, AppFirst completely dismisses the notion that IT will soon just disappear. IT sits at the nexus between customers and the business, making it the ideal conduit to communicate customer needs. AppFirst is delivering the solutions that will elevate IT to the strategic business model of other C-level executives, allowing organizations to make business and IT goals one and the same.”

IT is ideally positioned in the enterprise to drive and impact that customer obsession, and as the nexus point between customer and the services they consume, IT has focused and unique knowledge to lead the organization. As the role of the CIO evolves from simply managing assets to directly driving business innovation, organizations can utilize their unique visibility by sharing insight about customers with the rest of the organization, engaging the organization to innovate at a grassroots level, and executing on plans to bring that innovation to market.

In order to support this transition to true alignment, technology executives must have access to the business and system metrics that live within applications to provide critical business visibility through technical operations. AppFirst delivers the platform and solutions needed to be able to use those metrics to drive business.

“In today’s competitive market, companies must have clear insight into their own operations in order to make critical decisions about growth, pushing their systems while ensuring their customers’ satisfaction are still top priority,” said Christian Berczely, vice president of engineering for Intelligize, and AppFirst customer. “We were well aware we needed a higher level of visibility into our systems, but the thought of building and maintaining such a system was daunting, and costly. AppFirst’s solutions delivered exactly what we needed and I’m thrilled that my engineers can continue to focus on delivering features to our end users instead of building and maintaining a service like this. Today, we have clear visibility into our systems and applications and exactly how our customers are using them.”

“In the age of the customer, it’s more important than ever for enterprises to innovate to differentiate… I&O can be that spark that ignites innovation,” writes Jean Pierre Garbani, vice president and principal analyst for Forrester Research, Inc. in his October 4, 2011 report entitled Transform Your I&O Organization Into An Innovation Machine’. “Only in organizations that have a partner player relationship – where technology and its leaders are viewed as a critical to go-to-market offerings and provide a source of differentiation – will you be able to deliver unique and competitive solutions.”

AppFirst’s new initiatives support the steps required to build a true partner player relationship by delivering the platform and technology to allow a business to move from an organization devoid of any operations risk management to a model of complete alignment of business and IT operations.

AppFirst’s new initiatives deliver a complete package of solutions targeting people, process and technology that allow businesses to move along the path to a partner player model without incurring huge expenses. The three options, providing solutions to move from planning to alignment, include:

• Jumpstart – Allow first time users of AppFirst to get up and running quickly in a planning mode to allow IT to be focused on managing system risks. The package implements a single view of operational risks and rapid root cause analysis, and AppFirst experts are even able to manage the initial set up for organizations short on time.

• System Risk Management Solution – Following AppFirst’s continued commitment to DevOps teams, the System Risk Management solution delivers tools that provide a 360 degree view of risks and use baselines, enabling execution of any technical action from a common set of data. This allows companies to be alerted to, and prevent failures, and allows IT to evangelize prevention over recovery.

• Business Risk Management Solution – The third package moves organizations to a truly aligned state where IT is the go-to source for business risk management by delivering technology that enables business performance metrics to be integrated into the risk framework.
For more information on these initiatives, or any other AppFirst solutions, please visit the website at www.appfirst.com.

Join the AppFirst hosted webinar to learn more on Wednesday, March 28, 2012 at 10:00 am Pacific/1:00 pm Eastern, AppFirst chief marketing officer Pamela Roussos, with guest speaker Jean-Pierre Garbani, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, “How Tech Execs Can Move From the Backseat to the CEO Business Table”. Register for the Webinar before Wednesday; there is no charge to attend.

About AppFirst, Inc.
AppFirst is the leading SaaS-based provider of critical business and system visibility solutions that allow organizations to closely align their IT and business goals to manage business risks. Focused on mid-market IT executives, as well as application architects and DevOps, the company delivers the platform and solutions that integrate business performance and system metrics into a single repository, providing cause analysis at a glance.

The company provides a simple yet thorough way to use business and system-related metrics to quickly and easily identify the root cause of application and infrastructure problems and measure the impact to the business, increasing revenues and customer retention. Founded in 2009, AppFirst is a New York City-based company venture backed by FirstMark Capital, First Round Capital and Javelin Partners. For more information, visit http://www.appfirst.com. Follow us on Twitter or subscribe to the AppFirst blog to stay up-to-date on the latest AppFirst news.

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

The CIO Balancing Act

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As IT executives evolve their responsibilities from day-to-day IT asset management to that of a business leader in the organization, how do they still do both successfully? As with so many things in life, it is all about finding that balance.

In his recent article in Forbes, contributor Perry Rotella discussed this balancing act and shared his thoughts on how CIOs can spend 80 percent of their time focused on the business agenda. Along with given, yet critical, points such as hiring the right people and empowering them to run the day-to-day business function, he notes that establishing business metrics and then focusing on the key metrics is essential if the CIO is to step up to the business table. This is a timely point because to me, IT goals are business goals. Any IT application at its most fundamental level is about the business; in fact I’d go so far to say that if an application is not about the business, it’s most likely weakening the business. CIOs today have access to tools and methodology solutions to assess and view critical business metrics, in a repeatable and highly consistent manner, providing enormous insight to leverage and work more successfully with cloud computing technology.

Rotella says that in establishing business metrics “..not only do solid metrics relate technology support directly to revenue and customers, but they enable the CIO to focus on managing by exception rather than getting caught up in technology management.” In other words, by focusing on the right key metrics, CIOs can impact the day-to-day running of the IT group, while still devoting much of their time to the business agenda. For instance, while ‘up-time availability’ might be a flashy number to throw around, Rotella contends that eradicating human error is much more critical. He’d rather see CIOs reviewing root-cause analysis of outages and understand any caused by human error. Then putting technology or processes in place to rid the organization of what he calls these ‘self-inflicted outages’ will have a much bigger impact. How are you taking advantage of today’s tools and solutions to leverage your step up to the business table?

We’re hosting a Webinar on March 28 at 10 am Pacific/1 pm Eastern where we’ll be discussing “How Tech Execs Can Move From the Backseat to the CEO Business Table”. Our CMO Pamela Roussos is hosting the seminar, with featured guest speaker Jean-Pierre Garbani, vice president and principal analyst of Forrester Research, Inc. Please register today for this lively and informative discussion that will help you find your own balance between the IT department and the business table. There is no charge for the seminar and we welcome your participation!

AppFirst Chosen as Finalist for SIIA CODiE Award

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Next generation application and infrastructure monitoring solution reaches final round for Best Systems Management Solution

NEW YORK, NY – March 21 2012 – AppFirst, the next generation application problem resolution system for the application performance management market, today announced it has been chosen as a finalist in the SIIA CODiE Awards for 2012 in the Best Systems Management Solution category.

The AppFirst solution is the most powerful and effective server and applications monitoring solution available anywhere. With AppFirst, the limitations of incomplete or missing information are removed. Its ‘miss nothing’ data collection gathers data for every component in an application stack no matter what language it is written in, without impacting production systems. In addition it gathers data from other sources such as Nagios, Windows Performance Counters, and log files and aggregates and stores it all into a single repository. Using AppFirst users can correlate the data to provide context specific views to easily identify problems and trends, to be proactive and address issues before they impact the users.

“We have always worked hard to provide the very best and most complete information for our customers,” said Pamela Roussos, chief marketing officer for AppFirst.  “The SIIA CODiE Award is one our industry holds in high esteem. Being named as a Finalist for this year’s award certainly validates our efforts and direction.”

About the CODiE Awards

SIIA members will review and vote on CODiE finalists. The final winners of the SIIA CODiE Awards for 2012, Software and Ed Tech categories, will be announced at an evening awards event being held at the All About the Cloud conference, May 10, 2012, in San Francisco.

The SIIA CODiE Awards recognize excellence in the business software, digital content, and education technology industries. All nominated products and services receive a thorough review from seasoned industry experts who can identify strengths and give significant insights for improvements. In 27 years, SIIA has recognized more than 1,000 companies for achieving greatness in industries that expect innovative thinking and demand market validation.

About AppFirst, Inc.

AppFirst is the leading SaaS-based application problem resolution service designed to provide application architects and DevOps complete visibility into their applications across the entire application stack. AppFirst is an agnostic solution, supporting a wide range of applications, regardless of language, application type or location (cloud, physical or virtual servers) and incorporates its patent-pending Miss Nothing Data capability. This unique feature is designed to provide clear insight into executing applications. Users can quickly correlate with other data sources, allowing a proactive approach where IT professionals can see changes before they become problems, reduce customer churn, and drive down the cost of operations. Founded in 2009, AppFirst is a New York City-based company venture backed by FirstMark Capital, First Round Capital and Javelin Venture Partners. For more information, visit http://www.appfirst.com. Follow us on Twitter or subscribe to the AppFirst Blog  to stay up-to-date on the latest AppFirst news.

WebSockets

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WebSocket is a web technology for bi-directional, full-duplex communication channels to communication over a single Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) socket. WebSockets allow an application to push information back and forth between server and browser, rather than having to poll the server at set intervals or use <iframe> tricks — this allows web developers to cut down on unnecessary HTTP traffic, hacks and complexity.

The diagram below shows our current architecture:

In our experience with WebSockets, we ended up using node.js and the node.js module socket.io which were important in running the Websocket servers in the diagram above. The load balancer was using a node.js module called node-http-proxy which took in Websockets requests from the client browsers and sent them to the node.js server with the least amount of open connections. The RabbitMQ queue server was used to send real-time data to the node.js servers. Django is a web application framework that takes in regular HTTP requests and renders the request for the browser.

The logic is as follows:
The user will login and request the real-time web page from Django. Django will then pull historical data from its backend so that the client browser’s graph can display past data. Once the web page is fully rendered the client browser will communicate with the load balancer and, in doing so, maintain a WebSocket connection with one of the node.js servers. Once the node.js server is connected successfully it will subscribe to a queue from the RabbitMQ server and as it receives data from the queue it will automatically push that straight to the client browser.

Some of this was more difficult than it probably needed to be, in large part because the technology is constantly being updated, a lot of the older documentation from blogs or forum posts are outdated since the syntax is no longer valid. We also came across some module compatibility bugs that could only be fixed by tweaking the source code. Luckily, the node.js community is large and very helpful in resolving these issues.

Since WebSockets are such a new technology, a current limitation is that only modern browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox support it which means it cannot be used for users that only use Internet Explorer. Socket.IO looks to help remedy this by providing alternative means of transport such as flash sockets.

It was fun playing with a young technology and integrating it without modifying the current architecture of our system. Real-time updates can be applied to many systems as a sort of bonus feature and it was fun programming in an asynchronous style.

WebSockets are still in a young stage but as time passes it will start to become more and more relevant in websites that want to push as opposed to pull data.  It is much more efficient than HTTP requests or any type of “polling” method and will allow for a better user experience.

Elevating CIO Roles to Their True Value

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We’ve noticed quite a lot being written and shared lately about how CIO roles are changing, expanding and evolving in today’s business. Predictions range from CIOs roles shifting to finance, to disappearing completely, or, as we think, elevating to the strategic business roles of other C-level executives.

In fact we feel so strongly about this that we’re hosting a Webinar on “How Tech Execs Can Move From the Backseat to the CEO Business Table” on March 28 at 10:00 am Pacific/1:00 pm Eastern.  Our featured guest speaker will be Jean-Pierre Garbani, vice president and principal analyst of Forrester Research, Inc. and we’ll discuss the evolving role of the IT executive.

In a recent article in CFO World, author Roy Harris discusses a study by Getroniks UK on the changing role of the CFO, and that study also found that 43 percent of respondents think the role of the CIO will eventually be included in Finance; another 31 percent believe the future role of the CIO will be coming from a non-technical background. Non-technical? What’s a CIO to do?

Today’s technology – from the Cloud to virtualization and software-as-a-service (SaaS) is freeing up CIOs from daily asset management. Does this mean they’ll be ‘freed up’ right out of a job? Hardly. Tools and solutions available today provide insight and visibility into the business like never before. Smart business leaders will recognize that the CIO has unique visibility and insight from technical operations into critical business metrics such as revenue/session, number of logins, time it takes to start up a game and so much more.  In a press release accompanying the study Getroniks UK CEO Mark Cook notes, “Only by freeing up CIOs from the day-to-day burden of managing assets will organizations be able to truly realize the value that a CIO can bring their business.” We couldn’t agree more.

In today’s business, with its emphasis on customer behavior and experience, application metrics are business metrics, and IT roles are business roles. Companies that recognize this and leverage it are in a stronger position for success. They recognize the evolving role of the CIO, and rather than talking about making it more finance-centric or getting rid of it altogether, they are elevating the role of the CIO to where it belongs: at the CEO business table. Smart companies know that CIOs and technology executives have unique and powerful knowledge of application metrics that provide critical business visibility through technical operations.  They allow a company that was merely customer-focused to become customer-obsessed. They have made IT goals and business goals one and the same. They have elevated the CIO to leverage their unique visibility to drive innovation, manage risks and propel business success.

Please join us for what is sure to be a lively discussion on elevating the role of the technology executive. Our Webinar is hosted by our CMO Pamela Roussos and features guest speaker Jean-Pierre Garbani, vice president and principal analyst of Forrester Research, Inc. There is no charge for the Webinar, so register today and join the conversation. You’ll learn the different archetypes of IT organizations, how to create and support IT as a partner player, how to create an innovation process, how to effectively share visibility into your company’s customer experience, and how your IT organization can engage to fund innovation for business success. Please join us!

CIOs Can Become Innovation Leaders in Their Organizations

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On March 26th, AppFirst will be hosting a Webinar on “How Tech Execs Can Move From the Backseat to the CEO Business Table.” Our featured guest speaker will be Jean-Pierre Garbani, vice president and principal analyst of Forrester Research, Inc. and we’ll discuss the evolving role of the IT executives. We did not stumble across this topic – technology executive roles are evolving and they can impact their organizations in powerful ways.

Last month in CIO magazine Peter High discussed the unique vision CIOs have of a business, and how this puts them in an interesting dual role he calls ‘CIO squared’ – a combination of chief information officer and chief innovation officer. (Read the article here.)

I think we’ll all agree that these days the successful business is more than just customer-focused – it is customer-obsessed. Technology executives are in a unique position to drive customer obsession because of their visibility into the business metrics of how users consume business services. This vision is made possible by powerful solutions available today that provide business and systems metrics. In combination technology executives have visibility into business risk and if/how they are tied to systems risk.

This powerful perspective puts the IT executive in the prime position to not only engage the organization in producing real innovation at a grassroots level, but in taking a leadership role in developing and executing the plans to bring those innovations to fruition.

According to High’s article, many companies, including Marsh and McLennan and Harrah’s Entertainment, already have an executive whose title reflects that ‘CIO-squared’ role. How can you use your unique vision to drive strategic innovation at your company?

Among the topics we’ll be discussing in this Webinar are how IT can create a three-stage innovation process, effective ways for IT to share its visibility into the customers’ experience, and how IT can engage the organization to fund innovations and resources to continually improve the customers’ experience.

Please join us for what is sure to be a lively discussion! There is no charge for our March 26th Webinar – join us by registering here.