Application performance management (APM) isn't just about making sure applications stay up and running. The focus has shifted to end users, since their opinion and perception of software performance is what matters. In this interview with a Knoa executive ESJ explores how "end-user experience" is transforming APM, specially in the face of the disruptive technologies of “cloud computing” and virtualization.

A leading analyst firm reports only 16 percent of workloads are running in virtualized environments today. In this guest blog post, a Knoa executive discusses the barriers to virtualizing business critical applications and offers some best practice advice to accelerate virtualization of ERP and CRM applications.

During this interview with ebizQ managing editor, Jessica Ann Mola, a Knoa executive explains how end-user monitoring solutions can help enterprises accelerate transition of corporate software applications into the cloud, offers some real-world examples of the ROI generated by shifting performance management to focus on end-user monitoring and offers three predictions in the end-user monitoring and management space (one of which has already come true!)

"Innovation is not particularly relevant unless it delivers competitive advantage. Information Management was looking for solutions that leveraged innovative technology resulting in high impact and value creation," said Jim Ericson, editorial director, Information Management. "We selected Knoa in the category of Performance Management ….”

Knoa’s VCEM monitors and manages real end-user experience for enterprise applications that are running in virtualized environments, delivered via SaaS or provisioned via cloud computing.

More news about Knoa VCEM can be seen in:
Enterprise Systems Journal
Cloud Computing Journal
Computer Business Review
CTO Edge
Information Management
Manufacturing Business Technology
The Virtualization Practice

Knoa GEM monitors all desktop and web-based applications running on users' desktops and collects specific metrics on utilization, user behavior, application health and system performance.

Whether in a recession or not, companies are being tasked to make sure they are squeezing every bit of productivity out of the technology investments already made. Looking to meet this timeless market need, Knoa Software unveils Global End-User Monitor (GEM), providing out-of-the-box monitoring of all end-user experience and interaction for desktop and Web-based applications available for employee use.

Its latest release, Knoa EPM 5.5 introduces advanced end-user analytics, comprehensive alerting, and enhanced correlation and analysis capabilities. These features “enable customers to quickly turn the Knoa end-user and application performance metrics into proactive remediation initiatives to both improve performance and reduce costs,” says the firm. We caught up with Lori Wizdo, vice president of Marketing at Knoa Software, to find what’s new with the firm, the marketplace, and what to expect from it down the road in the way of innovations.

Knoa Software has turned the pain of the typical enterprise user interface into a business opportunity. Knoa's products monitor how enterprise software user interfaces are used, providing the equivalent of a clickstream analysis of a Web site. By looking at the difference between the most productive employees and the least productive, it is possible to find work-arounds for the weaknesses in the user interface. Once the problem is understood, the user interface or underlying process can be improved.

By taking the guesswork out of managing the agent/customer interaction, and identifying problems from the agent perspective, end-user monitoring software gives contact center managers precise metrics on how effectively agents execute when using call center technologies. End-user experience and performance metrics effectively illuminate the last remaining black hole in the contact center, identifying system issues and pinpointing opportunities to improve the performance of servicing agents on an ongoing basis.

Jessica Kostek interviews Knoa vice president, Lori Wizdo, in light of the company’s recent citation by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) as a leader in QoE solutions to explore the implications for CRM deployments and Contact Center Operations.

Like motor sports, call center performance is measured in seconds – and any time you can gain gives you an advantage. Knoa’s entry in this nascent field (agent/technology interaction monitoring) is the next step in driving efficiency to the advantage of both the customer and the call center, making it an entrant to keep an eye on.

The Knoa-Serene alliance is intended to help in end-user issue identification, since most CRM initiatives are hampered from inception by insufficient visibility into the real impact of the end-user experience on performance. Ajit Kumbhare, co-founder and managing partner of Serene Corporation, says that until recently, "there was no effective way to systematically capture meaningful data on the behaviors that drive service efficiency and productivity."

Despite the ongoing importance of customer experience, nearly 40% of firms were given 'poor' or 'very poor' ratings, while only 11 percent received an "excellent" rating. Are you center's apps holding you agent back, or are your agents bungling the system? To find out, look at what's happening at the agent level.

Counterintuitive as the notion seems, sometimes the only way out of a financial crunch involves spending more to make more. "It's all about having visibility of where you need to take remedial action. A United Kingdom contact center that did a deep evaluation of what its employees were finding valuable and useful. The organization soon discovered that employees thought of a training program costing $100,000 annually as essentially useless. Cutting the program instantly lifted a financial weight off the organization—and an annoyance off the employees."

In this Business Trends Quarterly podcast, Derek Prior, Research Director with AMR Research and Thad Eidman, CEO of Knoa Software discuss performance management software for ERP systems and resolving ERP issues by placing a greater focus on the end-user.
Hear the Podcast | Read the Article

One of the biggest issues that companies have had over the years with enterprise application software is maximizing its use. And that’s the focus of a relatively new category of software called end-user experience management. Knoa Software is one of the champions of this new software category.

It's more important than ever that companies get maximum value out of their existing assets and investments. Real end-user intelligence from end-user management tools provides comprehensive metrics–real data -- that can show what is happening as your people use enterprise software technologies to execute the processes that drive the business. No business intelligence system is complete if it doesn't include end-user intelligence – because it's the people that make the business happen.

What if you could cut your IT spend by 20%? Guess what. You still wouldn't be a hero. Want to provide value to the business? Identify ways to decrease call-handing times in your contact center. Pinpoint problems that are extending the order-to-cash cycle. Isolate a sloppy user interface that is frustrating your order management staff and impacting month-end shipments.

That's the kind of stuff that can really move the needle!

Effective CRM has the potential to drive increased sales, cut down costs, and increase employee productivity. But if end users respond unfavorably to a CRM system, is it of any use? A recent survey conducted by Knoa, a provider of software measuring end-user experience and performance management, suggests that many enterprises have a difficult time getting employees to interact with CRM systems.

A majority of the survey respondents, 65 percent, said end-users within their organizations complain about the usability and response time of their CRM system. And 60 percent of respondents expressed "concern" that a lack of adoption and use of a CRM system causes the information to be inaccurate, or unrealistic. The survey revealed that the stakeholders in CRM implementations recognize the importance of end-user experience, as only 16 percent are not attempting to measure end-user experience at all.

End-User Experience and Performance Management (EPM) solutions give organizations a new focus on end-user adoption, utilization and performance, uniquely capturing a complete picture of the end-user experience and behavior -- allowing organizations to see when employees are working effectively, efficiently and compliantly.

British Telecom sees massive turnaround in its contact centers thanks to Knoa. The benefits BT realized are literally too many and varied to list in this space, but there are highlights, including improvement in contact center agent productivity. "We had been looking to deploy a response-time monitoring tool, when we evaluated Knoa EPM, which monitors the complete user experience," said Stuart Smith- Director CRM Performance Management, BritishTelecom. "Once we put Knoa out there, within a few weeks we started to see benefits."

It's the end-users of the enterprise applications who execute the transactions that drive the processes that drive the business. Are employees actually using the right transactions to execute the business process? Are they using them in the right way? Are the employees efficient, or are they making significant errors? Are the transactions effective, or are they cumbersome, requiring employee-invented workarounds? There's a new generation of solutions that can give you those answers: end-user experience and performance and management (EPM).

With more than 7,000 installed seats of Siebel CRM software, BT, the British telecommunications giant, decided it needed a better understanding of how this massive investment was performing. The best view, according to Philip McBurney, director of the CMP Program at BT Design, was from the desktop. "The main driver for taking on Knoa was to get an end-user view of the application performance," McBurney said. At the moment, Knoa is the leader in the market for end-user performance monitoring, according to J. P. Garbani, research vice president with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research.

Actionable metrics to improve agent performance distinguish those firms that achieve their contact center goals and those that struggle. A new source of metrics, provided by End-User Experience and Performance Management solutions (EPM), is emerging as a rich source of insight to enrich a call center performance management strategy. This article shows how a global telecommunications company raised the productivity of 300 call center associates by 25%, representing an annual recurring productivity gain of over $3 million.

According to this report, Knoa is cool because "Application usability and end-user performance are increasingly important metrics for measuring the value and performance of an enterprise's application portfolio. If users do not, or cannot, effectively utilize applications, then projects fail, so end-user performance and satisfaction are critical. This requires monitoring and measuring the end-user experience using this insight to target continuous improvement projects."

Knoa measures not just application performance but end user performance, enabling companies to quickly identify needed changes in training or user behavior to maximize ROI from enterprise applications. Just how does an end user get the most from their company’s ERP implementation? By using it to effectively do their job. Knoa is doing what SAP and the other ERP application makers should be doing: verifying that their software is actually usable in a real-world environment.

Companies might spend millions on an SAP or Oracle implementation. Knoa aims to help businesses determine whether they are getting the most from their investment. The New York company is rolling out the 5.0 version of its Experience and Performance Manager product this week. The software uses passive monitoring agents to track how users are interacting with products such as Oracle's Siebel customer relationship management (CRM) application, collecting information ranging from application errors to the workflow patterns users execute.

Knoa Experience and Performance Management (Knoa EPM) seeks to add a new layer to business process analysis and technical metrics for application performance by focusing on measuring how well traditional business applications like Oracle or SAP are delivering value to the business. Such a solution will (eventually) enable enterprises to be sure that the money they have invested in applications and in BPM is providing its intended value. After all, that is why companies have turned to BPM in the first place.

What do you say when the chief executive officer is asking why your company didn't reduce its order-to-cash cycle -- on of the key objectives that drove the investment in a new software application. Even if your company has a robust corporate performance management (CPM) system, chances are you won't have a good answer. This article explains how one industrial hard goods manufacturer used Knoa Experience and Performance Manager to identify the root cause of a key corporate performance shortfall.

Knoa Experience & Performance Manager has creates a strong argument for approaching performance analysis and management from the end user experience perspective. The end-user perspective is a very compelling addendum to traditional metrics that are captured and analyzed in enterprise computing.

Clearly, end user experience management is an area that all of the major performance management/system management companies will like to have as a complementary capability. And Knoa is just scratching the surface of what is possible in this area.

Without a strategy to measure end-user adoption, as well as gather insight about the end-user's experience with their CRM applications, many IT organizations are left with the reality that they can't manage and improve end-user adoption and proficiency. In the absence of comprehensive and representative data, many discussions regarding CRM application deployments are based on reported user impressions, limited visual observations, and occasional stopwatch timings. This results in extrapolations about the performance of the whole system that are inaccurate, and lead to decisions that are not in the best interest of the business.

How do IT leaders really know if enterprise software is being used effectively? Some experts think rather than tapping into traditional systems management solutions, the answer lies in a relatively new class of software. Systems management tools ensure that systems and the network infrastructure are up and running, but what they are missing are measurements of the end user's actual experience.

Enterprise applications like ERP, and CRM and SCM automate complex business processes where high levels of application performance are crucial. Yet many frustrated execs find that despite the small fortune they have spent on products to manage servers, networks and applications, the business constituencies still complain about the performance, usability and availability of those enterprise applications. This article explores how End User Experience Management software stabilizes the three-legged stool of Application Performance Management.

Consider this scenario. It's 12 months after the 'go-live' of your new ERP system. The management team invested to cut costs, bring products to market sooner, comply with regulations, and improve core end-to-end processes, like the order-to-cash process. So, what do you say when the CEO is asking why your company didn't reduce the "order-to-cash" cycle time by 10 percent, as planned?

The CRM value of these applications -- all of which focus on internal rather than customer-facing processes -- is clear for anyone who has interacted with a customer service or sales representative saddled with computer errors, the need to re-enter data, or a necessary workaround. Fixing that employee's user experience ultimately results not only in greater efficiency, but also improved customer interaction. The overall leader is Knoa Software with its Experience and Performance Manager (EPM) product, according to report author Jean-Pierre Garbani, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. "The company's key aim is to provide a technology that is able to cover all the potential needs of an IT organization in terms of end user experience measurement," he writes in the report.

It's the end-users of the enterprise applications who execute the transactions that drive the processes that drive the business. Are employees actually using the right transactions to execute the business process? Are they using them in the right way? Are the employees efficient, or are they making significant errors? Are the transactions effective, or are they cumbersome, requiring employee-invented workarounds? There's a new generation of solutions that can give you those answers: end-user experience and performance and management (EPM).

“Knoa Software’s solution in this market is grounded in its vision of fulfilling all the end user experience measurement needs of IT organizations. Knoa is an especially good fit for buyers that want a product that crosses IT operation and application development boundaries. In an integrated IT organization that cares for the end user experience, it is probably as important to create applications that are easy to use and minimize usability issues as it is to provide good online performance. Knoa's product allows the whole IT organization to work together on improving end user productivity.”

Get ready for a third stakeholder: IT, Business and now, the End-User. Traditional monitoring and management tools manage factors that impact end user experience, but they are blind to the actual end user experience. Excellent tools for measuring application availability, they provide no insight into real application performance from the perspective of the end user. The time has come to expand performance management horizons to include the end user experience.

Some of the software projects that companies implement fail. Stuart Smith has a method for saving them. When BT rolled out Oracle's Siebel CRM software to 12,000 call center workers in 30 locations 18 months ago, he also bought monitoring software from Knoa. "We now understand how people use the systems that we build," he said. "And this has allowed his team to identify and fix problems before they cause users to rebel against the system."

Kimberly-Clark's experience points to an issue that sometimes gets forgotten in the discussion of lengthy ERP implementations: the toll and time it takes to get people to use a new system, and use it properly. A huge help to Kimberly-Clark, said company representative Kay Chase, was the use of software from Knoa Software that monitors how employees use the system, called Knoa Experience and Performance Manager for SAP.

Without a strategy to measure end-user adoption, as well as gather insight about the end-user's experience with their CRM applications, many IT organizations are left with the reality that they can't manage and improve end-user adoption and proficiency. See how one financial services organization leveraged insight into end-user experience to ensure that all end users adopted their CRM application and were executing key processes effectively and efficiently -- the key to achieving business value and ROI from the application investment.

New developments promise to make the new application rollout experience somewhat easier than the corporate equivalent of root canal. Knoa Experience and Performance Manager helps automate the tedious process of gathering data about what the end user is actually experiencing when using an application. The Knoa system provides monitoring technology that eliminates the clipboard-and-stopwatch approach so developers can more readily see what part of the application has an awkward interface or convoluted workflow process.

Technology editor, J. Bonasia, interviews industry analysts and Knoa's CEO about End User Experience Management software. Forrester expects the market for End User Experience Management software to grow by 10% in 2007. "End user monitoring does more than just find the source of software problems," said Cameron Haight, a Gartner analyst. "Such systems collect data to report on the overall health of the business".

"If you think you're hearing a lot about management software lately, you're not mistaken. Knoa Software CEO, Thad Eidman says more and more business executives are starting to see the potential of software to enhance end user experiences." Technology reporter Gian Trotta, interviews Knoa's CEO in this ebizQ podcast. Listen to the podcast, read the transcript, or read Gian's review.

End User monitoring software can improve end user experience and performance to drive adoption of critical business applications. For the business executive and CIO who need to drive the highest possible levels of adoption; efficient and effective use of core enterprise applications; as well as drive return on investment, Experience and Performance Management systems are becoming a priority.

Adoption and problems with efficient and effective use of your software are not just your customer's problem. An insidious new form of 'invisible shelf-ware', a condition where partial adoption and non-compliant use of enterprise applications is the hidden cause behind unrealized ROI, is threatening software execs especially because it directly attacks the ISV business model and impacts the maintenance renewals, expansion and cross sale opportunities. End-User Experience and Performance Management (EPM) software can protect your revenues and profits.

"The insight into actual end-user experience gives us benefits across the board, helping target response time issues, solve end-user problems faster, identify usage and adoption issues, and even make priority decisions on ongoing application investments," said Stuart Smith, Director of CRM Application Performance at British Telecom.

"A new user performance management package from Knoa Software Inc is capturing CIOs attention for its ability to boost worker productivity and optimize application performance. Knoa's Experience and Performance Management suite lets IT departments measure employee response times, distinguish between system and user errors and monitor work-flow process – all in real time…"