Industry experts — from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2016. Part 5, the final installment, highlights the evolving IT environment, and offers a few predictions on the Application Performance Management market.

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

RELEASE QUALITY – THE NEW APPLICATION PERFORMANCE METRIC

In 2015, less than half of performance and development professionals used Release Quality as a baseline metric to judge application performance according to a report sponsored by HPE and blind survey executed by YouGov. This number is expected to rise in 2016 as organizations fully appreciate that there are no second chances with respect to making a strong first impression based on performance.
Todd DeCapua
Chief Technology Evangelist, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

2016 APM Prediction: Application Performance and Delivery Remain Top-of-Mind

API CHALLENGE DRIVES NEW APM, NPM AND ITOA TOOLS

Businesses will rely on APIs in their application stack more than ever, extending beyond internal business-related web services to infrastructure-related microservice APIs and external partner APIs. Development, QA and operations teams will face new challenges related to the integration of mission-critical services that are managed outside of their department, or even their organization. The concerns of these teams, when working with external service dependencies, are intertwined throughout the entire SDLC. Thus new tools will have to emerge that combine aspects of APM, NPM and ITOA relative to APIs, but more importantly, provide a common interface for easy cross-discipline collaboration between developers, testers and ops.
Neil Mansilla
VP of Developer Relations, Runscope

MICROSERVICES AND CONTAINERS REQUIRE REINVENTION OF APM

There will be increasing challenges for APM providers to be able to support the application (microservices), infrastructure (containers, SDx) and process changes (CI/CD) that are occurring in support of the needs of an increasingly digital business environment.
Cameron Haight
Research VP, IT Operations, Gartner

Perhaps the biggest disruption will be the continued adoption and evolution of microservices and containerization, which have really just started to become commodities. While microservices offer a lot of very compelling advantages, they also bring a new level of complexity to APM. The number of interacting components that make-up a system impacts all areas of troubleshooting, monitoring, logging, and debugging.
Sven Dummer
Senior Director of Product Marketing, Loggly

2016 will be the year where we see adoption of containers and microservices architectures truly skyrockets. It will be critical for APM solutions to provide additional and deeper metrics on containers performance. With modern containerized architectures gaining in terms of flexibility, speed and re-use, in a lot of cases the downside is a lot of additional complexity. APM solutions will need to focus on containers performance and how it maps to the overall application performance. There will be a greater need for higher visibility and additional levels of analytics for container-driven architectures.
Paola Moretto
Founder and CEO, Nouvola

APM has traditionally placed focus on user-facing services, such as web performance which took center stage in recent years. We are now in the rise of micro-service architectures, and in 2016, APM products will retool to focus on service-to-service performance analysis to better serve engineering teams.
Theo Schlossnagle
Founder and EVP, Products, Circonus

APM vendors will have to reinvent their products and business models to take advantage of and cope with Docker and containerization in general. Applications running on one JVM will get disaggregated into hundreds of micro-services, each of which talk to other micro-services on the same and different hosts. Transaction tracing between this "swarm" of micro-services will become essential. This is an enormous technical challenge that only leading edge APM vendors are equipped to meet. APM vendors will also have to revisit their pricing models as charging customers for each instance of each micro-service is simply not going to work.
Bernd Harzog
CEO, OpsDataStore

VENDOR OUTLOOK: CONSOLIDATION

As foreseen in previous years, the APM market continues to develop, both in terms of numbers of providers and inherent functionality, particularly with regard to end user visibility. However, a lack of fundamental differentiation between many of the providers means that consolidation is to be expected, either due to the collapse of (over geared) vendors, or via acquisition.
Larry Haig
Senior Consultant, Intechnica

APM Predictions 2016: Choosing an APM for Maximum Advantage

VENDOR OUTLOOK: THE BATTLE BETWEEN GROWTH PLAYERS AND STARTUPS

If we look at the market as falling into three categories: incumbent players, growth players, and startups, my prediction for 2016 is that the battle between growth players and startups will reach a feverish pitch. Growth players are driving toward going public, or perhaps having recently gone public, are driving overall customer growth. The younger startups in the space, in contrast, are seeking to flesh out differentiated products that will position them to take leadership positions away from growth players in 2017 and eventually from the incumbent players as well. But for 2016, the battle will be for mindshare between the growth players and startups.
Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx