In an interaction with Biztech 2.0, Sharryn Millican, senior director and general manager, CA Wily Division, CA Inc., talks about the issues IT heads face while managing the performance of applications running at their organisations and the future plans of her company, CA Wily division, for India.

What are the latest trends in the Application Performance Management market? How is your company CA Wily Technology placed in this segment?

Enterprises in the telecom and financial sectors are running lots of business processes at the back-end of their IT infrastructure. These business processes are very critical for them as they help to drive organisational revenue. The industry is growing at a tremendous rate and the way they are using business applications to extend better services to their customers is also changing dramatically. It is very essential for these enterprises to enhance the performance of their applications in order to provide non-stop efficient services to their customers. From Wily’s perspective, we are driving a constant change in the global application performance management market since many years and thus, helping organisations to enhance the working of their various applications. With the inclusion of new and advanced products in our portfolio, we are in a better position to serve our customers.

What are the issues IT managers are facing as far as Web Application Performance is concerned? How can enterprises optimise the availability of critical applications?

Historically, if we look at an IT organisation’s operation style, infrastructure management pattern and model of service delivery to customers, it is very silo based. Often, IT managers also find it difficult to oversee all the applications running at one point of time, ranging from network management to database monitoring. In an age, where organisations run multiple applications to manage multiple web-based services, most of them are looking at solutions, which will help them to manage not only their mission-critical applications but also help to enhance their performance. IT managers, in order to get better performance and RoI, need to monitor each and every transaction. Transactions can be monitored easily if applications are well-supervised. Wily is helping organisations to monitor each and every application. All applications are inter-connected and monitoring each of them makes an impact on all other applications. In order to optimise their applications’ availability, firms should look for solutions, which will help them to effectively monitor the working of these applications.

Could you throw some light on how the Application Performance Management market is shaping up across the globe and in India?

The growing usage of web applications is driving the market for Application Performance Management among large enterprises across the globe. The growth in Asia Pacific and Japan is lagging behind the growth we witnessed in North America. Now though, we can see the growth rate in Asia Pacific and India catching up. India still has some distance to cover before it can be at par with the Asia Pacific market. A lot of Web applications are being used to deliver services to end-users across India. This is changing the whole application market scenario. Organisations in India are now looking at delivering better services to their customers and also a number of MNCs are setting up store in India. Indian markets have opened up to a considerable extent throwing up lucrative commercial opportunities for international players. We are expecting a lot more from the Indian market considering the growth in the BFSI and telecom sector particularly.

Telecom is considered as an important segment in India. What are your plans to tap this vertical and what are the other verticals you are targeting in India?

We have targeted two key verticals till now, they are banking and financial and telecom. The top 10 global telecom companies are Wily customers. We have dedicated experts to help telecom players solve their problems. It is very critical for banks and telecom service providers not only to acquire new customers but also to retain old ones. We are helping them to extend new services to their customers, which will help both the above causes. We are making both short and long-term investments in India. We have a development centre in Hyderabad already. The market here is growing and we want to make the most of that. We are also adding new people to our team in order to expand our reach across the country.

You have tied up with SAP for your products. Are you also planning to develop a similar relationship with other vendors?

Absolutely. The SAP relationship has been a fantastic one. We have bundled Introscope with SAP and we did this because SAP has spent a lot in partnering and developing active global support organisations, and thus, efficiently servicing and supporting their customers. They have identified Wily as the best solutions provider to fit with their applications. The concept of bundling Wily with their applications like banking and remote support has not only helped us but also our customers. We have also extended our relationship with other major software vendors. If we look at the Indian market, HCL and Wipro can serve as efficient partners to support customers in deploying large applications. So we are expecting more such tie-ups with Indian companies in the days to come.