Aimed at eliminating hidden costs in business processes and improving business transaction performance, Nastel Technologies has released the AutoPilot TransactionWorks software module, which provides businesses with "360-degree situational awareness" of both operational and transactional data in a real-time view to identify their negative impact on application performance and then fix the problem.
This correlated real-time view brings together transaction management information, application performance management, middleware messaging data, and business activity data all in the context of your business to help reduce costs, improve service and manage risk, said Charley Rich, vice president of marketing and product management for Nastel, Melville, N.Y. "It lets you make the best informed decisions in the quickest amount of time."
The software is said to reduce transactional latency and improve business transaction performance while helping users to identify and eliminate hidden costs, or "stealth waste", in their business processes. Some of the stealth waste includes labor costs associated with performance issues in business transactions and what it takes to resolve them, Rich said.
So far, customers are reporting substantial savings. As an example, Rich noted that one customer reduced its trouble tickets by 70 percent and cut outages by 66 percent, which translates into a significant cost savings. Another company saved $1.18 million in "stealth" costs due to stalled transactions and labor costs, plus SLA breach costs and customer attrition.
What's unique about AutoPilot TransactionWorks is that it provides all the transactional discovery and operational data in one integrated set of capabilities, Rich said.
"The transactional discovery side is a nascent new market. We've had transaction processing forever but applications that deconstruct and discover business transactions -- distributed and mainframe -- is fairly new."
In AutoPilot TransactionWorks this is called "Business Transaction Performance," or BTP. It enables businesses to auto-discover the IT services and transactions that comprise their business processes such as payments, order management, accounting, and purchasing, and automatically maps them to the IT infrastructure and automates the determination and remediation of performance problems to improve service and minimize operational risk.
Real-time monitoring of business transaction performance is said to be key to continuous process improvement.
The biggest problem in business process management is producing the process and then being able to monitor it to continuously improve, said David J. Jackson, worldwide sales leader, banking, at IBM Corp., during a recent Web conference on "Driving Business Transactions in a Downturn Economy."
Inefficient processing increases "friction" in the system, which drives cost, lengthens time to delivery and increases project risk, Jackson said.
Jackson said three things need to happen to reduce this friction -- reduce cost, improve service and manage risk -- by getting insight into those dynamic processes and continuously improve efficiency. This is where AutoPilot TransactionWorks comes into play by finding where those inefficiencies are in these processes, he said.
Some of these inefficiencies are a constant cause of service-oriented architecture (SOA) problems and performance issues, but "you can't squeeze waste out of the process until you first visualize it," Rich said. "In a SOA environment, what transactions you have, where they are running and how they are performing are absolutely critical," he said.
TransactionWorks seamlessly integrates with all modules in the AutoPilot suite. It is IBM-validated as SOA Ready and Tivoli ready.
