Survey highlights SAP performance problems

Proxies are well known for being web gateways in many organizations, but as we've discussed here on this blog, there's a shift of proxies moving towards Application Delivery. In that vein, I'm highlighting a survey done by Network World today on SAP performance in the enterprise. SAP is a critical application in many of the largest companies.

In Network World's survey 90% of firms queried, reported they had monthly SAP performance issues. Dimensional Research surveyed 695 professionals at SAP’s Sapphire 09 user conference in Orlando, Fla.

From the Network World article:

While 10% of respondents said they never have performance issues, the rest aren’t so fortunate. One-third said they have one or two incidents with SAP performance per month, and 35% reported three to five incidents per month. Another 14% said they experience between five and 15 incidents per month, and for 8% of respondents, performance incidents occur almost daily.

Such incidents take a toll on operations, respondents say. Among the ways that performance problems impact that business are: deterioration in customer satisfaction (cited by 46% of respondents), loss of productivity within corporate IT (38%), loss of non-IT employee productivity (33%), lost revenue (22%), and penalties for missing SLAs (12%).

Getting to the bottom of a bottleneck isn’t easy. Asked how long it takes the IT team to identify the cause of a typical SAP performance issue, the majority of survey respondents reported it can take hours (cited by 46% of respondents), days (22%) or weeks (8%). Those able to identify a problem in just minutes (22%) or seconds (2%) were the enviable exceptions.

All this points to some of the requirements around Application Delivery Networks (ADN). In addition to the traditional idea of proxying an application, there's also a need for visibility (to help determine the cause of the performance problem), as well as a need for optimization across the corporate WAN links to reduce not only bandwidth consumption, but round-trip times for applications across the WAN. The results of this survey, point to the buzzwords ADN is using. Maybe ADN is worth a second look.