The current economic downturn has accelerated business consolidation and stepped up the need for innovation. Cost reductions, faster time-to-market, better products and differentiated services are now the key themes. These are coupled with information explosion through social networking and addition of new users -- for e.g., cell phone users who contribute to almost ‘n’ times of current data users, are adding to the complexity and demand for high performance and scalability from IT systems.

It is commonly observed that application vendors claim responsibility for optimizing the performance of the application while hardware vendors focus only on hardware and network vendors focus on network alone. This results in a sub-optimal solution from the customer’s point of view because no entity bears the responsibility of optimizing the entire technology stack in this scenario and performance issues remain unresolved for long. Undoubtedly, this disjointed approach leads to serious loss of productivity and thereby business loss. The solution lies in adopting a holistic approach where vendors bear responsibility of the entire technology stack.

However, if serious performance and scalability issues like bad design or bad coding practice resulting in non-scalable architecture are discovered at the fag end of the development, this leads to go; no-go decisions for letting the application go live. A no-go decision leads to lost business opportunity and most often a serious loss of reputation.

The suggested shift in the software engineering approach will result in higher predictability and risk reduction by ensuring that the business deadlines are met. This will also help in cost reduction and productivity improvement by ensuring optimal infrastructure cost. Better transaction response time will result in end users spending more time with their customers rather than waiting for the screen to appear. Thus a shift from reactive to a proactive mode is more likely to lead to higher performance and scalability as it would ensure that mission and business critical programs meet their stated objectives.

To sum it up, a move to performance driven development is paramount in realizing better value from technology investments and ensuring that the IT systems are aligned to organization’s business and scalability goals.