How do IT execs support and manage the delivery of enterprise apps to their branches?

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter By John Burke, Network World, 08/01/06

One point often discussed in this column is the fact that most people (about 90%) now work somewhere other than their corporate headquarters means that most people are using enterprise applications across the WAN. That being the case, in Nemertes’ latest benchmark research we asked IT executives how their companies support and manage the delivery of enterprise applications out to their branches (including their “branches of one” - their permanent teleworkers). Among other things, we asked whether they monitor the user experience of applications at the desktop.

Nearly no-one does. We got a few basic responses.

Most often, they would fall silent for a moment, then say that they did not monitor the user experience at all, although they really felt they ought to, ideally. Reasons for that varied from lack of tools to lack of staff, and one summarized well the challenge for many of them and the reason for their current response: “We have 50 to 60 desktop builds that are sanctioned/supported. We have 4 or 5 supported standard desktop and laptop computers. We don't watch them all, we don't test them all. Tolerance for slow performance is variable; some people complain no matter what they have, some won’t complain no matter what, and folks have the PC they have, they don’t try others'.” There are too many variables and there is not enough demand, in other words, and as long as the users will mostly content themselves with what they have, the status quo can continue.

Next most often, the CTO or CIO would say yes, but a moment later it would emerge that in fact they meant that they got regular user feedback on performance via surveys, or service-desk follow-up questionnaires. This can get you excellent information and drive steady improvement of services, as well as steady improvement (or maintenance) of the business units’ perception of IT’s service orientation. If you do it a lot, and do it properly, that is.

A few people said that they do instrument and monitor performance from the user perspective but only sometimes. Mostly, it was not part of regular operations; it was something done during application testing and deployment. Less often, it was something IT did temporarily, in response to persistent problems or in particular branches where application performance is really important. Among these were the folks who deployed automated traffic generators to replicate user transactions from the edge of the network, without actually putting monitoring on the PCs.

A very few people said yes, they actually do comprehensive or extensive monitoring from the desktops. These were companies with lots of desktops and lots of applications (over a thousand). Some ran special applications like UserMonitor, others relied on SNMP reporting of things like CPU load and network throughput.

And lastly, a fair number of folks said that it was not necessary to do so, because as far as possible they had removed the PCs as a factor in performance. These were the folks who had gone to remote desktopping using Windows Terminal Server or Citrix or Tarantella. For them, the desktop is largely a remote keyboard/video/mouse device (and in some places was being replaced with actual windows terminals). As long as it was up it was performing adequately. When pressed, they allowed that it was more complicated than that, in that they still needed to see to the security and patching of PCs acting primarily as remote desktops, but that from a performance standpoint, monitoring at the desktop was not of any use unless a user phoned in a complaint.

The momentum in the responses seems to be with this last group. Businesses are moving to make the desktops thin clients for all important corporate functions already, using Web-based application interfaces rather than dedicated clients and even pushing users to centralized rather than local storage.

The logical endpoint of that evolution, one that is also very attractive from the maintenance, staff time, security, and compliance perspectives, is actually using the PC as a thin client against Citrix or Tarantella, or replacing the PC with a real thin client, a WinTerm or SunRay or such. With the IT infrastructure being reshaped by the need to maintain connectivity among users and data centers because the data centers are the source of all corporate IT services and home of all data, the worry that loss of connectivity equals loss of utility no longer so sharply distinguishes terminals from full-function PCs as it used to.