Waistlines traditionally expand as the weather gets colder. Quest Software, recently acquired by Dell, has discovered bloating can be a problem for companies using cloud applications as well, according to results from a new survey the company sponsored.

Senior IT officials from 150 companies with more than 500 applications and $500 million in revenue were surveyed by Harris Interactive for the report, which concludes companies are potentially losing millions due to poor application management.

More than half of respondents said applications that were slow, unresponsive or crashed cost their businesses big money each year. Twenty nine percent of respondents reported losing money in the millions, and 7% said they lost tens of millions or more each year.

Quest is a maker of application performance management (APM) software, a field that has expanded in step with the growing world of cloud and mobile applications. Legacy vendors like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft compete with mid-sized companies and upstarts, from AppDynamics and New Relic to AppNeta, for control of this growing market.

The pitch from these companies is similar: If no one is watching your applications, you’re losing money. Automating the monitoring of applications and building alerts when something isn’t working properly can reduce downtime and save money. Additionally, some APM tools have predictive analytics capabilities that alert users to problems before they happen.

In the survey’s view, that would be a big help for IT departments unable to keep a watchful eye on all its applications. Less than half of applications are accessed more than five times a day by 76% of IT managers, according to the survey.

Companies have been making use of APM tools to fix a wide variety of problems. Vodafone Ireland used HP’s APM tools to increase performance and centralize monitoring and Aptela used AppNeta’s APM appliance to fix problems with its users networks.

Follow Adam Riglian on Twitter @AdamRiglian

In September, Amazon Web Services launched a marketplace for reserved instances — a contracted, fixed-term version of its cloud infrastructure. Cue the analytics startup.

InstanceVibe.com, a two-week old baby of a website launched by Roman Stepanenko, offers analytics and alerts to prospective buyers in the reserved instances marketplace.

“Generally, each company has a preferred timeframe for the amount of time they want to have an instance. Especially with the startups, if you want to have a reserved instance, you have to pay some cash up front,” he explains. “If you want to find perfect instance for your needs, you need to keep logging into the AWS console. [The] natural solution is to supply some sort of alert where you supply the criteria to what you’re interested in and you’re notified by email.”

Stepanenko, a former financial services developer who founded structural exception search engine BrainLeg in April, said he bought the domain right after he saw Amazon’s announcement. The website launched two weeks ago. He got the idea for the site from his own experiences with the reserved instances marketplace.

InstanceVibe users set a certain criteria for the type of instance they want to find, including the amount of time they want on the contract and the amount of usage. The marketplace is scanned by InstanceVibe regularly and alerts are sent out to users when instances are available with their criteria.

Alerts are free for t1.micro instances. Costs scale up to $9.99 for two weeks and $14.99 for four weeks of unlimited alerts for any instance. Each time the marketplace is scanned, the data is stored in a historical prices database and analyzed to show the best possible prices over a certain amount of time. Those analytics are free.

“Every time I scan the marketplace I am saving these data points in my database and that allows me to analyze when instances are sold and when they become listed,” Stepanenko said. “I can calculate the best costs of ownership historically [based on the information].”

Read more from Adam Riglian on SearchCloudApplications.com. Follow him on Twitter @AdamRiglian

Ever wonder what happens to loved ones on business trips? New survey data suggests stopping — it’s nothing good.

ON24, a San Francisco-based virtual events company, sponsored research with Harris Poll that suggests a large percentage of business travelers would rather stay home — even if some are having a little too much fun on the road.

“We’ve seen dislike for business travel escalate and in our last study, it was well over 90%,” said Tricia Heinrich, director of strategic communications at ON24. “What we uncovered is this infringement on personal lives. That is what has underlined this dislike of business travel.”

The wide majority of respondents, 85%, felt that work was a major infringement on personal time, while 91% said that spending too much time away from home because of work could have serious consequences.

Some of those consequences might relate to the bad behavior respondents reported engaging in on the road. Drinking too much alcohol was the most common vice with 71% of respondents pleading guilty. Others ate fatty foods (53%), spent too much money (54%), gave up on exercise (43%) or went to bed too late (42%).

Those really in trouble were the 66% that reported cheating on a spouse and the 31% who said they engaged in illicit drug use on the road. ON24 has compiled a website letting weary travelers contribute horror stories from the road.

ON24′s software aims to eliminate a lot of these problems with virtual events and webcasting. The company’s service is used for company meetings, user conferences and training.

“People just want more control over their schedule and their life, they hate to waste time, everybody is busy. It’s just more convenient to do many things online,” Heinrich said. “We’re not advocating the replacement of all face-to-face meetings, it’s just what make sense for your audience and your objective.”

Let these stats serve as a warning to anyone attending Dreamforce, OpenWorld or a Gartner Symposium.And if you can’t make it to Dreamforce, follow our live coverage at SearchCloudApplications.com.

Craigslist is turning off the data taps, a potentially foreboding sign for cloud and mobile app developers.

The Verge’s Louis Goddard reports that the online classifieds giant has informed search engines that it no longer wants its posts to be indexed. That decision blocks the 3Taps API and damages PadMapper, the popular consumer apartment rental site that displays Craigslist postings on Google Maps.

Goddard adds that Craigslist has been in court with both PadMapper and 3Taps, seeking to bar both from using Craigslist postings for their own purposes. PadMapper will now try and gather its own listings through PadLister, but it’s unclear whether the new service will be able to step in and fill Craigslist’s role.

The unanimous opinion in the blogs is that Craigslist is severely injuring itself. It doesn’t take an expert to explain that site traffic will go down without Google and Bing. Craigslist also loses any traffic that was generated by PadMapper users coming to Craigslist to explore listings further.

The question for developers becomes – if Craigslist is willing to cripple itself to shutoff third-party apps, will others be willing to do the same?

Twitter’s director of consumer products, Michael Sippey, wrote a letter that had developer’s panicking about the prospect of increasingly stringent API rules back in June. Mike Isaac of AllThingsD explained that the changes are likely designed to create a more “consistent Twitter experience for every user.”

But, he also rightfully noted that yes, minor changes to Twitter’s guidelines could drastically affect thousands of apps and the people who make their living building them.

There’s no clear answer as to what is going to happen next, but the app economy that relies on data passing through open APIs is only as lively as the APIs are open. It is seemingly irrational for the data providers to want to hurt the third-party developers that build off of their services, but as the Craigslist case shows, rationality doesn’t always win out.

The cloud applications tide has been rising for some time and it’s beginning to raise the boats in a spinoff IT sector – cloud application performance management.

A slew of vendors are popping up offering services to monitor EC2 spending, bandwidth, network performance, application performance and other advanced metrics. AppNeta, a Boston-based company located in the city’s growing “Innovation District,” is one of those vendors. Today, it released AppView Web, an addition to its PathView Cloud platform that will monitor app performance on the public cloud and offer insight into an apps performance over a network.

CEO Jim Melvin sees AppNeta as a way for users to increase the reliability of public cloud applications. He describes a common occurrence in IT departments – Salesforce.com is running slow in the office, IT calls Salesforce to ask why and they tell them that everything is running normally in the Salesforce data center. Melvin says this constitutes a typical call to AppNeta, which issues automated responses to IT through alerts, dashboards and reports that explain when the problem is on their side of the fence.

“If companies are looking to move towards public web applications, like Salesforce, like Google Docs, like a backup system like a mail system, they cannot take the plunge without some level of assurance, and that’s what we offer,” Melvin said.

Public clouds do have failures, as evidenced by recent outages in Amazon and Salesforce, but Melvin said that downtime in the office is often caused by network glitches or by inefficient use of resources. He describes two common examples – quality of service errors and BYOD.

Quality of service describes the way applications get prioritized on the network. Melvin says it is relatively common for a router to go down and be brought back up without anyone noticing, but that when new routers come online, they aren’t wired to respect quality of service, which creates a logjam.

The BYOD era adds an extra layer of confusion to the process. Anyone firing up their iPad in the office may inadvertently begin synching all their applications, from work-related apps to iTunes, soaking up a huge amount of bandwidth that takes away from apps in the cloud.

When asked what percentage of problems AppNeta respond to are caused by human error, Melvin estimated close to 90%.

“IT infrastructures are just incredibly resilient, they almost never completely fail because they are so dynamic,” Melvin said.

The market for performance management appears to be growing based on all the product news that has come out on an almost daily basis. Riverbed Technology announced a product upgrade that adds capabilities around quality of service today.

For more on application performance management (APM), check out contributor Crystal Bedell’s story on SearchSoftwareQuality.com.

Get ready, because it is coming. Developers are currently working through the kinks of its third beta, but iOS 6 will be here in the fall and enterprises are starting to take notice.

With roughly 200 new features in iOS6, including Apple’s highly publicized move away from Google Maps, is creating problems for developers who are frantically trying to figure the new world out before iOS6 goes live.

“So many of the developers use some form of GPS and mapping in their system, getting familiar with the Apple way of doing things is kind of a big deal,” Tom Lounibos said.

Lounibos is the CEO of SOASTA, a test automation company that is focused heavily in mobile app development. SOASTA’s new TouchTest platform, which allows for test automation on a large number of devices and accounts for new user interfaces like Jester, is designed to increase the availability of mobile test. He cited an IDC report that stated 80% of testing is done manually in mobile, mainly because there are so many different devices.

“Most of our customers have had to do manual testing, and they’re getting to the point where there are too many points of failure to keep up with,” he said.

From his perspective, the 6.3 beta of iOS is looking to be more stable than previous releases and the new features, especially the visualization and mapping ones, have developers in his circle excited.

“The user experience is changing. You used to have one-dimensional cool stuff like maps. Now instead of looking at a map while you’re driving, you can talk to Siri about that map,” he said, adding that he thinks this is just the beginning. He cited machine-to-machine interfaces as a rapidly changing segment that will forever alter the application world.

He also speculated that a world where applications are no longer tied to devices is soon at hand. He envisions things as futuristic as map applications popping up on car windows as being within reach.

“We’re just at the beginning of some enormous changes in the way people will interact with applications,” he said.

Lounibos had some other thoughts on the mobile app world and the issues facing it.

On Windows’ entry into mobile

“The question mark has been out there and with RIM being in whatever limbo they have been in, it’s caused a big opening for someone else to come in and be number three.”

“I think Microsoft is making some good news. I think Windows has a big following and a big developer community already in place; I think the tablet announcement has been big.”

APIs and the companies putting them out

“A lot of brand names where you would say ‘Are they still in business?’–all of sudden you see their API strategy. You’re going to see a lot of old-school brands jumping the shark.”

On cloud computing

“I really believe cloud computing is a byproduct of mobile, and not the other way around.”

Lounibos’ predictions

• The mobile development market, meaning build/test/deploy/manage or mobile PaaS, is looking to be a $100 billion market.
•  Believes that mobile apps will hit 2 million by the end of the year, up from an estimated 800,000 apps currently.
•  Predicts that the most growth in mobile apps will be in enterprise mobile because “they jumped in late.

– Adam Riglian, @AdamRiglian

What do Walgreens and APIs have in common? Ubiquity.

The pharmacy giant partnered with Palo Alto, Calif.-based API management company Apigee to launch an open API around its QuickPrints service, allowing third-party developers to incorporate Walgreens photo printing service into their own photo-sharing applications. The new program launched with five partners – Pinwheel, GroupShot, Kicksend, Pic Stitch and StillShot.

“Really what it’s showing is that businesses of all types need new ways to reach consumers and new ways to scale,” said Marcia Kaufman, principal analyst with Needham, Mass.-based IT analyst group Hurwitz & Associates. “The API is really no longer just for an [online] company, it’s not just for Google.”

Walgreens initially launched QuickPrints as an app, but decided to also offer the QuickPrints SDK (software development kit) so any photo sharing service could include it. Third-party apps that use QuickPrints get a share of revenues after photos are purchased. For users of third-party apps supporting QuickPrints, they will now be able to select a photo for printing on their phone and pick it up an hour later at a Walgreens store, with no need to create a separate Walgreens account or login.

“We always had the vision of offering that functionality to third-party application developers,” said Joe Rago, senior product manager at Walgreens.

Rago said that this is the first step into the API world for Walgreens, but that it wouldn’t be the last. Taking advantage of the enormous digital photo market was his team’s first goal, but that eventually they plan on finding other ways to use APIs to expand Walgreens business.

“A good way of putting it is putting an API around our stores, bringing our stores to the internet,” he said. “Photo was a logical first entry point, just with the sheer popularity [of it].”

Kaufman compared Walgreens’ open API to the pharmacy chains inclusion of on-premise photo processing. She said that it was innovative at the time for a pharmacy to become a one-stop shop for birthday cards, groceries and photos, and added that this is no different.

“It puts Walgreens in a very innovative position, as opposed to closing up shop and saying this business of producing photographs isn’t so lucrative anymore,” she said.