Compuware Acquires dynaTrace: Application Performance Management

By David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton, Upside Research

Application performance management is more important now than it ever has been, with applications that reside both in house and in the cloud, and applications that have components that are split across applications, systems, and environments. Organizations need to pay attention now more than ever to how well their applications perform under a wide range of potential operational issues.

The Applications Performance Management (APM) market received attention recently when traditional application management vendor Compuware recently announced its acquisition of dynaTrace, a leading innovator in the evolving APM space. The all-cash acquisition, valued at $256 million, closed July 1, 2011. The acquisition reflects the changing landscape of applications performance management.

With the rise of virtual and private cloud computing environments, the need for applications performance management has risen dramatically. Suddenly, response time becomes critical, and IT departments need to contend with the distributed nature of applications. In addition, consumers of applications, whether they are employees, partners, or customers, have ever-increasing expectations of acceptable response times when interacting with an application. For example, even the slightest delay in a financial trading application for brokers, or a glitch in an online banking application can cause significant disruption to work or customer attrition, both situations that businesses want to avoid. Application Performance Management tools are designed to help IT.

A number of vendors have seen the opportunity in the applications performance management market, including BlueStripe, AppDynamics, New Relic, and dynaTrace. dynaTrace enables IT to trace individual transactions from the end user’s browser through various levels of enterprise middleware and back to the end user. The company’s technology is branded PurePath, and provides unprecedented visibility into the user experience regardless of platform (cloud, traditional), which is one of the key components to improving applications performance.

The acquisition of a category leader like dynaTrace will help bolster Compuware’s profile in the APM market. dynaTrace is expected to increase Compuware’s revenue by as much as $150 million over the next two fiscal years. The company brings with it more than 400 customers, including Thomas Reuters, Macy’s and SAS. More importantly, the value of Compuware’s acquisition of Dynatrace is that it provides even deeper capabilities for Compuware’s solution to help organizations understand the true performance of applications across increasingly diverse operational tiers and environments.