After a successful CMG ’08 show and the holidays I was finally able to catch up and continue my discussion with Lanir Shacham (Founder and CTO) of Correlsense. The Correlsense team, friends and families are all safe and sound during the current Israeli crisis which I’m happy to hear.

In this podcast, Lanir and I dive into the approach that Correlsense and their SharePath product takes for the first of four key areas that a Business Transaction Management (BTM) solution must incorporate which is Transaction Discovery.

Listen to the podcast for insight into the thoughts Lanir shares on these Transaction Discovery topics:

• Transaction Discovery Techniques and why an agent based approach is the only way to discover end-to-end transaction flows.
• Transaction Types including synchronous, asynchronous and aggregate transaction scenarios.
• Transaction Discovery Agents and why one core agent type is all that’s needed in most cases.
• Architectures for Transaction Discovery Storage, Transaction Data Store or Data Warehousing, OLAP and techniques for supporting both real time and historical analytics and intelligence capabilities (monitoring, dashboards, reporting, charting, what if’s, etc.)

In our next podcast, Lanir and I will discuss the second core capability of a BTM solution which is Transaction Tracing, Tracking and Stitching.

You may subscribe to my podcast feed via Feedburner, iTunes or simply play or download the podcast from this post.

If you have any feedback or comments on the topic of BTM for myself or Lanir 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.

These are my links for January 5th through January 6th:

• Open source network management buzz comparison 2008 – As it’s the start of a new year I thought it would be an ideal time to look back over the year just gone. I have used Google Trends to compare the number of searches during 2008 of various open source and proprietary network management tools.
• Use Your iPhone for Virtualization Management? Integrien – Back in November, the company unveiled an iPhone option. It worked with Apple to develop the application, and the product is currently shipping. The configuration setup is similar to a Blackberry BES, in that an Integrien server has to run in the data center.

  Is this a capability that you would find useful in your IT shop?

• Corda Technologies and Vigilant Ink Partnership Agreement – "By partnering with Corda we are able to offer more options for our clients in our Business Service Management solution suites," said Matt Hooper, CEO of Vigilant. "In the IT market it is imperative that you enable dashboards with interactive data and strong visualization. Corda's clear commitment to leading the evolution of data visualization from static charts and graphs to interactive, intuitive strategic dashboards demonstrates a roadmap of integration and capability that our clients are looking for."
• The Google-ization of Bechtel – Network World – The SaaS model allows us "to bring in a different cost model that can afford us to have a high-capacity, global, collaborative work environment," Ramleth says.

  The risk for enterprises that don't start a SaaS migration strategy soon is that their IT organizational structures will be a competitive disadvantage, Ramleth warns.

  "If they don't start thinking about this soon, the changeover in the future will be really hard," Ramleth says.

• Application Platform Strategies Blog: SOA is Dead; Long Live Services – The latest shiny new technology will not make things better. Incremental integration projects will not lead to significantly reduced costs and increased agility. If you want spectacular gains, then you need to make a spectacular commitment to change. Like Bechtel. It’s interesting that the Bechtel story doesn’t even use the term “SOA”—it just talks about services.

  And that’s where we need to concentrate from this point forward: Services.

• Burton Group: SOA is Dead; Long Live Services – "SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on 'services'. "
• Business Transaction Management – The Next Generation Of Systems Management – The new paradigm – Business Transaction Monitoring

  The “new generation” of systems monitoring and management tools, widely referred to as Business Transaction Management (or BTM), offer a new approach. Instead of monitoring SQL statements, tcp/ip packets, and CPU utilization, Transaction Management tools view everything from an application perspective. In the world of transaction management , an application is considered as a collection of transactions and events, each triggering actions on the infrastructure. The goal is to track every transaction end to end and correlate to the information collected from the infrastructure. Such an end-to-end view enables to quickly isolate and troubleshoot the root cause of performance problems and start tuning proactively. This application-centric information base enables a group of professionals working together to “speak” the same language and focus on facts, rather than guesswork.

• IBM – Introduction to BIRT (TCR) Framework – ** Tuesday Jan 6, 2009**

  -This STE will cover:
  -BIRT components
  -Installing and Configuring BIRT
  -Learning Basics
  -Creating a listing report using BIRT templates
  -Creating a listing report using Maximo templates
  -BIRT Report Designer Maximo extension
  -Connecting to a Data Source
  -Retrieving Data
  -Binding Data
  -BIRT Architecture
  -Report Object Model (ROM) Specifications
  -Scripting in BIRT
  -Events Sequence
  -Deployment options
  -Adding a field to existing report
  -Localization and BIRT

  Presented by: Amer Seifeddine

  Date: January 06, 2009
  11:00 AM Eastern US

• Compute in the Cloud, Not the Fog – Piercing the Fog

  Having considered all the various techniques of monitoring end-user experience, the best approach to monitoring and managing applications in the cloud is to adopt tools needed to implement the following strategy:
  * Dynamically monitor the performance of all, or at least a high percentage of, end-user transactions directly at the browser to catch any application performance problem unique to a particular end user or the transaction path taken through the cloud. This technique is by itself sufficient. However if there's a chance that the application may have no traffic, or there is a need to baseline the application for competitive or reporting purposes, this monitoring technique can be supplemented by…
  * A synthetic monitoring service to run in 15 minutes to half-hour interval to determine if the application is "up" or collect baseline information.

  The strategy can help IT navigate through the fog of cloud computing and deliver the best performance possible.

• Correlix upgrades Latency Intelligence – The new version of Correlix's multi-route engine traces latency within the same transaction over multiple physical routes to support the detection of variant flows, minute variances and aggregated transaction latency. Demand for this functionality has been driven by broker/dealers, asset managers and liquidity venues looking to improve order routing and correct slow market data paths.
• Business Transaction Management: Application Performance Management Solutions – Quick Tips – Monitoring every single transaction from the end user – through the network and all the way to the back end of the data center is the only way for an application performance management solution to cover all of the bases that are listed above. The discipline of doing this is called Business Transaction Management or BTM.