A well-executed performance center of excellence (CoE) can increase productivity, reduce costs, open communication lines, enhance quality and prioritize performance analysis. While the initial creation of a performance CoE can be costly, the risk of not having one in place is too dangerous in today’s environment. If a business application fails, usually the customer is impacted. And in today’s climate, keeping the customer happy is a company’s number one goal.

voke, an independent analyst firm, defines a performance CoE as, “an internal competency center focused on enhancing and validating the performance of applications to meet business requirements. It provides a management and automation platform for performance optimization processes, as well as consulting services, support services, and leadership and advocacy to help the organization understand the importance of performance validation and optimization and the CoE model. Through the performance CoE, project teams are able to take advantage of all the expertise, toolsets and best practices the CoE has developed.”

voke, inc. recently produced a Market Snapshot™ report about the value of a performance CoE.¹ For the report, voke surveyed companies who have established or are in the process of establishing performance CoEs. All participants were responsible for performance centers in their companies.

The findings revealed that the most significant benefits realized were:

• Increased application performance
• Centralized best practices
• Increased performance test coverage
• Increased performance test coverage
• Increased effectiveness of tool use
• Reduced hardware

Additionally, participants also saw benefits in:

• Visibility
• Quality
• Efficiency
• Lifecycle Citizenry
• Cost savings

As outlined in the voke report, the following steps should be taken to initiate and produce a successful performance CoE.

1. Establish buy-in
2. Collaborate with the line of business
3. Customize the approach to fit your organization
4. Acquire skills
5. Acquire technology
6. Focus on customer satisfaction
7. Pilot – prove the results
8. Promote the results
9. Motivate the CoE staff

According to survey results, when you implement a performance CoE, a company can expect to yield results through:

• Increased resource efficiency
• Shared skills and talent retention
• Increased organizational maturity with respect to quality
• Increased organizational maturity with respect to quality
• Enhanced overall quality through an increased number of tests, increased test coverage, and early defect detection that eliminated production defects
• Added scalability, with benefits derived from one project/organization being applied to others enterprise-wide

The voke report says, “The current economy mandates that application performance is more critical than ever. Performance testing is not a tactical exercise; it is strategic. Centralizing this competency in a performance CoE delivers strategic value by:

• Preserving and extending existing investment
• Leveraging limited resources (doing more with less) to meet quality, schedule, and budget
• Consolidating human, software, and hardware resources for knowledge and asset sharing
• Enhancing performance in new and existing applications
• Using the full capabilities of today’s robust automated testing products.

Because software is the driving competitive force behind any business, examine your performance testing results and explore establishing a performance CoE. Understand the strategic value performance delivers to the business. Customers correlate satisfaction and performance.”

A performance CoE can help your business stay competitive and meet the performance expectations of your customers and internal clients.

HP Performance Center helps you analyze and validate the performance of your applications against business requirements and mitigate the risk associated with application deployments and upgrades.

Using minimal hardware resources, HP Performance Center lowers the cost of distributed load testing by providing a standard solution that can be managed via the Web, providing 24x7 access to a shared testing infrastructure.

Read the complete voke Market Snapshot™ report and learn more about what HP solutions can get you started on the path toward a performance center of excellence.