eG Innovations  announced the results of its annual worldwide survey of over 150 IT operations professionals in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific on managing service performance in transformational IT environments. The study shows that companies find it difficult keeping up with the performance management requirements of virtualized IT infrastructures.

Transformational IT technoloies like virtualization and cloud computing are bringing in change in the IT services industry. While these transformational IT technologies offer operational and cost benefits, they also make management of business services much more challenging because of the dynamic nature of the infrastructure.

Management tools for physical environments are difficult to use and not designed to handle the dynamic inter-dependencies in virtual infrastructures. The eG Innovations 2012 study finds that IT operations are looking for new performance management practices and solutions to catch up with the pace of technology change.

"Virtualization and cloud technologies render the traditional, manual approach to performance management inadequate," commented Karin Kelley, analyst, Infrastructure Software, 451 Research. "To deliver on the ROI promise, today's IT ops need to automate and accelerate the diagnosis and resolution of performance issues in dynamic and complex service environments."

Key findings include, IT operations professionals struggle to manually diagnose root cause problems in heterogeneous service environment.  54 percent of IT professionals surveyed said their single biggest performance management challenge is identifying the root cause of slow application performance in such heterogeneous environments. 

Another finding shows that managing virtual and physical machines is a challenge. A very high percentage of respondents (53 percent) are looking for solutions that can manage performance of both virtual and physical machines as well as the applications running on them.  Also, IT wants integrated performance monitoring across all infrastructure tiers. 60 percent of respondents say they are using multiple, independent performance monitoring tools today -- one for the network, another for servers, and another for the database and one for the virtualization tier. 66 percent say they are looking for comprehensive solutions that provide answers to cross-layer performance issues. 

The finding also shows that poor service performance impacts customer satisfaction: The number one business impact of poor IT service performance is decreased customer satisfaction say 53 percent of respondents.  IT operations professionals are looking for proactive problem solving: 63 percent of respondents are looking for performance management solutions that allow them to become more proactive and find problems before they impact the user experience. 

"Businesses are eager to reap the benefits of cloud computing and virtualization: increased agility, scalability and cost reduction," commented John Worthington, director of consulting, Third Sky.

"IT operations have to deliver the same or better end-user experience with fewer resources and less money. Process improvement and service definition are essential to long-term success, and customers who attempt to take a short-cut around these realities eventually face frustration. Organizations must find a way to do both process and service-oriented improvements in order to succeed in the new world," Worthington added.

eG Innovations provides intelligent performance management solutions that accelerate the discovery, diagnosis, and resolution of service performance issues in virtual, cloud, and physical service infrastructures.