BTM Podcast Series: A discussion with SeaNet Technologies

After a successful CMG ’08 show and surviving (?) miserable flights back to the East Coast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Bernie Davidovics, Founder and CTO, and Raymond Marra, EVP of SeaNet Technologies on Business Transaction Management (BTM).

SeaNet Technologies has been around for some time now originally founded in 2001 with their first product in 2003. Their strong suit appears to be in the financial and trading services space with a focus on transaction management in highly complex, mission critical end-to-end, multi tier environments. They claim to be the only vendor in both the enterprise and financial services / trading desk environments at this time.

SeaNet has a unique focus on high volume and latency sensitive transaction management architectures. They focus on not only round trip transaction management but specialize in one way transaction (multi-cast push) discovery, monitoring and management. Precision timing and clock synchronization is one of their specialties.

Here are some of my take aways from this very detailed discussion on BTM as seen by SeaNet Technolgies.

• You must measure the end user experience in terms of the business transaction
• Today, IT resources (people, technology) are consumed with chasing potential problems, “ghosts” or anomalies rather than explicitly focusing on the critical problems
• Pain, suffering and business need are the key drivers to push clients towards a BTM solution.
• It’s not that 99% of the transactions are bad, it’s that 1% are bad and they’re difficult to identify and find when you’re in an environment that handles 2B or more transactions a day, 1% is a lot!
• BTM enables bridging the gap (the Grand Canyon really) between IT and the business (and between IT groups)
• Whomever has the best data wins – if the only data available is that the business has experienced some significant impact (loss of money, trades, etc) then they’re going to be listened to. BTM solutions must equip IT with high quality data to be able to manage problems and anomalies from.
• SeaNet was born into the financial, trading and market services area and this appears to be their strong suit. SeaNet plans investment in “enterprisey” features and functions in the near future such as formal IT management tool or CMDB integrations, ADM and visualization of e2e services, “decoding/mapping” of common and emerging enterprise protocols, applications, etc.
• Adding the “Real Business Context” to discovered transactions is still a manual process and we should be careful about claims from any vendor in this space that “Real Business Context” can be automagically added. I wonder if this is where we need to bring in integrations, information and data from some of the other friendly “B” acronyms such as Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Business Process Management (BPM). Could this be the path to automatically associate the “Real Business Context” to discovered low level transactions? I think so.
• Successfully adopting BTM solutions requires one or more new roles within IT and the business that have deep business and IT knowledge and experience across the entire end-to-end service delivery chain
• The “typical” enterprise monitoring group must evolve and mature to be successful with BTM in many areas such as in depth knowledge of application and transactional architectures, business operations and business impact assessment/understanding
• There is some level of expected maturity, standardization and operational preparedness expected in terms of general IT management and monitoring before venturing into deployment of a BTM solution. For example, thorough instrumentation and monitoring of applications (COTS and Custom) should be in place.

It was a great discussion and opportunity for me to hear about the BTM approach from the perspective of a company that is a bit different than those I’ve spoken with to this point. It’s very clear that the financial and trading market services market has a very different need than many traditional enterprises and service providers.

This pedigree, coupled with SeaNet’s network based passive approach to transaction discovery and inventory, tracing and stitching, monitoring, intelligence and analytics sounds like a solid foundation for a business transaction management solution. I’d enjoy hearing more from a SeaNet Technologies customer or others with direct experience with their technology and products.

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If you have any feedback or comments on the topic of BTM for myself, Bernie or Raymond, please leave comments. If you’re a vendor, subject matter expert or practitioner in the area of Business Transaction Management (BTM) and would like to chat on a podcast, please feel free to contact me directly.