The marriage of Gomez and Compuware is starting to bear fruits. One of the key aspects of web application performance management is end user experience. This is approached largely from the data center standpoint, within the firewall. But the best solution to understand the real customer experience is to have an agent sitting on the customer side of the application, without the firewall, a possibility that is clearly out of bounds for most public facing applications. The Gomez-Compuware alliance is the first time that these two sides are brought together within the same management application, Compuware Vantage. What Vantage brings to the equation is the Application Performance Management (APM) view of IT Operations: response time collected from the network and correlated with infrastructure and application monitoring in the data center. But, it’s not the customer view. What Gomez brings with its recent version, the “Gomez Winter 2010 Platform Release” is a number of features that let IT understand what goes beyond the firewall: not only how the application content was delivered, but how the additional content from external providers was delivered and what was the actual performance at the end user level: the outside-in view of the application is now combined with the inside-out view of IT Operations provided by Vantage APM. And this is now spreading outside the pure desktop/laptop user group to reach out the increasing mobile and smart phone crowd. IT used to be able to answer the question of “is it the application or the infrastructure?” with Vantage. IT can now answer a broader set of questions: “is it the application, the internet service provider, the web services providers?’ for an increasingly broader range of use-case scenarios.

The Gomez Winter 2010 Platform brings more new features: more browsers from which scripts can be run, a better script recorder to capture test scenarios, load testing for mobile devices and a combined dashboard with Vantage that let the administrator quickly understand whether the issue is internal or the internet. It is also a great solution to monitor the quality of service of applications in the Cloud.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Regards,

JP Garbani