Is Business Transaction Management a Neologism or The Hope of the Future for IT?

28th June 2011

There is a blog on the internet that sought in 2008 to develop a definition of business transaction management. At that time, Wikipedia wouldn't even host a page on the topic because it claimed that it was a "neologism." Wikipedia believed the page was an attempt to increase usage of the term. Now, just over two years later, the term has enough secondary usage to be recognized as a "right term."

The truth is there is still some ambiguity as to which term all the players on the application performance management court want to use. IDC Research and EMA Research have adopted the term to describe granular application management and managing applications and services at the transaction level and from a business perspective. Gartner tends to favor the term business transaction tracing (BTT) or transaction profiling.

The companies that are supplying transaction management solutions tend to differ in their focus on what BTM should be as well.

BMC leans toward a definition that BTM looks "across components in a sophisticated technology stack to determine how the pieces are involved in and contribute to complex business transactions". OpTier assumes that the term speaks for itself, which is a valid point. HP sees BTM as a way to help "IT know how the components in the IT infrastructure relate to the business transactions they support." Correlsense defines BTM as a way to "track every transaction end to end and correlate to the information collected from the infrastructure." Nastel Technologies sees BTM as a concept that embraces both IT transactions and non-discoverable, non-IT activities that are interdependent. These non-IT events could involve people, market fluctuations, changes on a commodity exchange, materials shortages, etc. Non-IT transactions are often impacted by the performance of IT transactions.

The ultimate BTM solution needs to embrace each of these visions. It must serve business. This means that a solution that is able to correlate data within the context of the business environment surrounding a company is essential if a business is going to grow. When IT becomes integrated into the larger business picture and provides the business with a more complete picture that includes full visibility, then choice-making becomes more effective.

Business transaction management isn't a neologism. The term is here to stay. What it defines should expand to include business context and governance over the full spectrum of a business' transactions.

Denise Rutledge - About the Author:

develop website content, with a focus on writing materials that develop brand and trust through valuable, simple to read information.