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451 Research: IT Gets a New Tool to Solve SaaS Performance Challenges

By Lindsay Shaw
| | 5 min read

Summary


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Last month 451 Research, an independent analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation, published an Impact Report by Peter Christy and Dennis Callaghan. The report addresses the new challenges IT teams face as SaaS applications are being adopted in their organizations. They found ThousandEyes to be “an innovative and differentiated application to address the new problems” of SaaS performance.

From “ThousandEyes helps SaaS providers and customers see network problems”:

When a company changes from an in-house application to a SaaS equivalent, the transition may be nearly invisible to the application user, but dramatic in terms of application performance visibility for the IT team. The performance of the application proper is no longer directly visible because it is operated remotely by a different organization, and frequently neither is the performance of the connecting network as it evolves from an enterprise WAN connection to some combination of ISP and Internet connectivity.

These new network configurations require new tools in order to restore visibility to issues in network performance (a necessary precursor if poor application performance is to be remediated). The ThousandEyes application fills that gap, providing innovative methods for measuring network performance and localizing problems that occur on networks owned and operated by other organizations, such as the network service provider of the enterprise or of the SaaS application operator.

ThousandEyes has created a modern cloud-delivered application to help identify and remediate network issues that manifest themselves as performance problems with the use of SaaS applications, or (often equally important) demonstrate that the performance issues are not caused by the network. The company is one of the first vendors to address the new challenges that arise as enterprise application use evolves to SaaS applications.

ThousandEyes has incorporated performance-measurement software and services in its eponymous SaaS offering. It enables the network team of an enterprise using SaaS applications (such as salesforce.com), or a SaaS vendor, to view and analyze the performance of the network connections involved when enterprise users access SaaS applications; identify network-caused performance-related issues; and collaborate with partners, including network service providers, to remedy the problems.

ThousandEyes includes features that enable collaboration between the different teams that may be involved in the diagnosis and remediation of the network problems that ThousandEyes identifies (e.g., an enterprise network team, the enterprises network service provider, the SaaS team). While working within the tool, a network admin can easily enable a partner to use suitable functions in the application by sending the partner a URL – the application is SaaS and used through Web interfaces – that, when referenced, puts the partner into the application with the context relevant to the problem being addressed collaboratively, similar to how a Dropbox user can easily share a URL that enables another person to access a specific file or folder whether or not the other person is a Dropbox user.

For the full, in-depth report from 451 Research, including a contrast of ThousandEyes with legacy performance tools and the SWOT analysis, download the Impact Report on ThousandEyes directly.

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