CAST Automates ERP Performance Analysis

According to Jitendra Subramanyam, director of strategy and research for CAST, most IT organizations have little to no visibility into what issues are actually affecting ERP application performance. The CAST tool, for example, was deployed in 30 SAP installations, where it discovered that interactions between SAP software and the underlying database were being improperly handled 80 percent of the time.

Subramanyam said the more IT organizations customize ERP applications, the greater the potential becomes for performance issues to arise. This is due in large part, said Subramanyam, because the developers working with the toolkits provided by ERP vendors tend to not be as sophisticated about how the software interacts with underlying middleware and database software.

The idea behind the CAST analysis software, said Subramanyam, is to provide a tool that discovers patterns in software deployments that are adversely affecting performance without requiring IT organizations to hire dedicated specialists to analyze various middleware and database software deployments.