If there’s one way we want to be thought of at AppDynamics, it’s as a customer-driven, customer-centric company. Customer needs are what drives the innovation in our product. Customer success is what drives our day-to-day operations. So it’s fitting that a high point of our first customer conference is recognizing outstanding accomplishments of AppDynamics customers.
AppDynamics leaders Jyoti Bansal and Joe Sexton took the stage Tuesday night to honor a group of exceptional customers who have embraced, leveraged, and enhanced the AppDynamics platform with the first AppSphere Transformation Awards — but not before they first paused to recognize two “AppDynamos,” employees who spearheaded the monumental efforts of our staff to put together AppSphere: Elizabeth Hall and Tracy Kraft.
Now, I’m pleased to present here the inaugural AppSphere Transformation Award Winners.
Cisco Systems
Business Impact Award
Most impressive ROI/TCO
As the worldwide leader in designing, manufacturing and selling Internet Protocol-based networking and associated services, Cisco provides a broad line of products for transforming data, voice, and video within buildings and across campuses. AppDynamics was rolled out globally across the organization’s 23 data centers, deploying a total of 15,000 agents in just one week. All of this was set up to report back into a single AppDynamics-hosted SaaS controller. AppDynamics’ value was evident in the reduction of false positive reports, which were costing the company an average of 7,000 man-hours per year and deterring the team from focusing on other issues. Employing data-driven troubleshooting as opposed to a gut-feel approach, Cisco has seen a significant operational impact with AppDynamics.
Pearson
Cloud Master Award
Highest impact of cloud migration
Pearson is uniquely placed to help meet the global demand for better education and skills. It applied its innovative technology to promote collaboration throughout the education ecosystem and transformed its business into a digital marketplace to educate the world. The company’s portfolio contains more than 800 digital assets and over 100 million distinct transactions for professors and students. The company additionally experiences peak seasons that drastically increase the load on their systems. Understanding the necessity of a robust cloud infrastructure, Pearson has been migrating its applications to public, private, and hybrid cloud environments, and has built one of the most unique private cloud environments in the world. With AppDynamics, the company can understand both the demand for and utilization of these resources, and determine where and how it needs to scale those resources. During the recent back-to-school season, Pearson utilized AppDynamics to save more than $700,000 across a single digital asset, and also achieved five times scalability on a separate digital asset.
The Kroger Company
DevOps King Award
Most noteworthy use of AppDynamics to make an impact on the DevOps culture
The country’s largest supermarket chain and the fifth largest retailer in the world, Kroger has 2,400 stores globally. The company brought in AppDynamics to ensure successful support of its key customer support applications. Kroger was able to utilize AppDynamics’ powerful dashboards to the fullest to drive the fastest dev to ops cycle and to increase visibility across teams. By using AppDynamics across the entire lifecycle, Kroger has reduced its mean-time-to-resolution, maximized the quality of its releases and increased performance. In the future, Kroger plans to work with AppDynamics to help build service impact models, which will further aid root cause analysis and problem management.
Bwin Party
Rapid Deployment Award
Quickest large-scale deployment
As the world’s largest publicly traded online gambling company, the successes of this company are linked directly to live sports action of world-wide games. Bwin Party started the deployment prior to one the largest sporting events in the world, just months before the 2014 World Cup Championship. Bwin Party rolled out roughly 1,000 production servers in less than 10 business days. With a large portion of the business dependent on sports betting, and the 2014 World Cup kicking off a few weeks after the deployment, Bwin.Party arranged remote boot camp sessions to enable more than 35 key stakeholders in development and operations to leverage AppDynamics capabilities during the World Cup, moving from reactive to proactive monitoring and troubleshooting.
ExactTarget
Data Analytics Award
Most creative use of performance data to drive business results
ExactTarget, a subsidiary of Salesforce, is a global leader in email marketing and cross-channel interactive marketing services. With a distributed, complex application environment, and a mix of legacy components and new technology features, the company chose AppDynamics because of its platform agility and ability to deploy and run within six hours. With AppDynamics, ExactTarget was able to immediately drill down into issues that existed for years, and work with its development teams to address them. Delivering close to one billion emails daily and pushing close to two million metrics a minute, it continues to leverage the value AppDynamics provides in large-scale enterprises. With its investment in AppDynamics, ExactTarget has drastically improved visibility into its mission-critical mail application. The company has also been able to identify the root cause of production issues that previously took months or longer to resolve. Additionally, ExacctTarget has reduced the mean-time-to-resolution, maximized the quality of its releases and increased performance across the enterprise.
Citrix
MVP Award
Standout thought leader of 2014
Citrix’s applications are used by millions of users worldwide to collaborate, present, train, and communicate ideas. As an early adopter of AppDynamics, Citrix is largely responsible for helping AppDynamics think differently about the needs of the enterprise customer. Citrix leverages every feature of AppDynamics, and has contributed to the development of all of them. In development, the company uses AppDynamics to assess the quality of applications before they move to QA. In QA and performance testing, it pulls detailed information out of the AppDynamics platform to understand where there are failures, where there may be faults, and how well applications will scale with customer demand. In production, all of its key applications are monitored by AppDynamics, and the knowledge developed in dev and QA is leveraged to better understand its applications in production.
Comcast
Engagement Award
Most users served
As the largest broadcasting and cable company in the world, the largest home Internet provider in the United States, and the nation’s third largest home telephone service provider, Comcast epitomizes the engagement aspect of business. With 40,000 new customers activations per day, AppDynamics has optimized the application used for new customer acquisition beyond expectations. By reducing downtime, there is a direct bump to the bottom line through the ability to connect and activate more customers each day. In the customer support organization, AppDynamics significantly reduces the administration of APM, and avoided the dreaded blind spots that bottleneck customer support call centers.
Union Pacific Railroad
Scaling for Success
Most complex large-scale deployment
As a leader in technology-driven innovation, Union Pacific is in the forefront of using next-generation sensors, analytics, and systems for safe and efficient operation of the railroad. With hundreds of tiers and thousands of nodes, Union Pacific is impressive not only in the size but also the complexity of the deployment. Out of thousands of Java Virtual Machines (JVMs), no more than a dozen are identical. This diversity makes the environment especially challenging. Union Pacific leverages AppDynamics to trace every transaction across the enterprise and to pinpoint the exact location of issues.
DIRECTV
The Zen Award
Best service in during seasonal peak traffic
DIRECTV is one of the world’s leading providers of digital television entertainment services and offers its customers access to exclusive sports programming. The company started its deployment of AppDynamics more than a year ago, with a goal to deploy on the first Sunday of the football season. Following this deployment, the company delivered a flawless video experience for millions of football fans around the country. Less than six months after the initial deployment, DIRECTV expanded this application to support the global demands of the 2014 FIFA World Cup.
Concur
Mobile First Award
Highest mobile end-user impact and highest end-to-end correlation
As the world’s leading provider of spend management solutions and services, Concur offers corporate travel booking, expense management, and invoice management services. This cloud-based company service processes more than 350,000 expense reports and 120,000 travel bookings per day. The company has a total of $50 billion pass through its service every year — roughly 10 percent of the world’s total annual travel and expense spending. As would be expected for a travel-focused service company, the demand for users to access the website from mobile devices is constantly increasing. With AppDynamics Mobile Real-User Monitoring, Concur is able to effectively provide its services through a mobile interface to users, as well as receive real-time mobile performance data and behavioral insight into the mobile end-user experience. With up-to-the-minute granular code-level visibility for both web and mobile applications, Concur has dramatically accelerated its resolution process and reduced MTTR from hours or days to minutes or seconds.It can now ensure that all the apps are performing as they should, and that users are happily able to do what they need to do — from wherever they are.
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The post The Envelope, Please! Meet The Inaugural AppSphere Transformation Award Winners written by Dan Berkowitz appeared first on Application Performance Monitoring Blog from AppDynamics.