According to a report from Denise Dubie at Network World, Aberdeen Research polled more than 200 organizations between May and June 2008. Sixty percent of them said that they weren’t satisfied with the way their business critical apps were performing.

The good news from all this is that you can take comfort because you are not alone. It is okay to admit that you have a problem with performance… of your critical applications. Lots of IT departments have performance problems from time to time. It’s more common than you think.

[Being an irreverent person employed as editor of a corporate blog means that I have a strict innuendo budget, and if I don’t use it up by the end of the year, it’s hard to justify the budget for next year. -ed]

Now, with NetQoS being a company that sells network performance solutions it would be easy (and tempting!) to suggest that perhaps all that you need to solve those performance problems is better visibility into the network, i.e., the very solutions that we sell, and don’t you wanna sign up for a demo right now?

But no – it’s not that easy. While 85% of those polls said that the amount of performance data collected in the past two years had increased, only 41% said that they improved their organization’s success rate in preventing performance problems. That’s certainly significant – but to take a glass-half empty view - what about that other 44% who increased the data they collected but didn’t improve the company’s success rate in preventing performance problems?

Luckily Aberdeen drilled down deeper, and as Dubie reports:

Forty-three percent of those polled in September said a primary obstacle involves an inability to identify performance bottlenecks before applications are deployed on the network. More than one-third identified monitoring analyzing network and application performance while also deploying a WAN optimization solution as a key challenge. More than one-quarter are challenged to find relevant and meaningful data when filtering through performance data. …

What seems to happen is these cases is that companies may have spent money on technology but are using them only as diagnostic tools for when something goes wrong; not maintenance and planning tools for the future. Performance bottlenecks can be identified before application rollout, for example, but you have to do significant testing before deployment.

As for the other reasons, we’ve made headway into some of the problems – SuperAgent integration with Cisco WAAS helps to retain visibility in Optimized WAN connections, we constantly test and tweak the NetQoS Performance Center UI in order to find the best ways to organize and present performance data so that it’s easy to find the relevant and meaningful data.

Other problems, we’re still working on. But the overriding concern is that companies are spending money on solutions (as hackneyed as that phrase can be in IT) but using them only as tools. It’s not just the technology – it’s how the technology is used.

And something used improperly will make it difficult to accomplish anything – I should know, I’m the type of guy that uses a screwdriver as a butter knife and a butter knife as a screwdriver…