About the Author

Mike Hicks is currently an independent consultant and has been involved in the world of application performance management (APM) for many years. He has authored numerous white papers on the subject, in addition to the following two books:

• Managing Distributed Applications: Troubleshooting in a Heterogeneous Environment (Prentice Hall, 2001)

• Application Performance Management: An Introduction (Compuware, 2001)

Trained as a network engineer at the Dover Harbour Board in England, Mike worked as network manager at the Canterbury and Thanet Health Authority, and then moved to Siemens, where he was seconded to Ford Motor Company as a network specialist, maintaining the company's European network as well as connections to its U.S. headquarters. Later he became network manager for the European Space Agency (ESA), maintaining and optimizing its operations network based in Darmstadt, Germany, as well as designing and supporting temporary networks to support ESA space missions and NASA missions with ESA payloads.

Since moving to Australia, he has worked as a network consultant for dozens of major corporate clients, including Cisco Systems, Singapore Airlines, IBM, BP, ANZ Bank, Telstra, BT, and Telecom NZ. In addition, Mike works closely with many infrastructure vendors in the area of application profiling and management.

Mike was able to combine his network engineering background knowledge with his considerable practical experience in the APM world to produce a mix of technical and business requirements that make it possible to define the optimum delivery of the application.