2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 7

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, AIOps, Observability, OpenTelemetry and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2023. Part 7 covers the user experience.

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 6

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT MOVES UP THE PRIORITY LIST IN 2023

Digital experience management (DEM) has become extremely important over the past year, as it has a direct impact on employee attraction and retention. The new world of widely distributed workforces and hybrid work has placed a greater burden on IT teams to make sure employees remain productive and satisfied in their work. We predict that DEM will continue to move up the priority list and garner more IT budget in the coming years as HR departments will be looking to the CIO and the IT organization to remain competitive in terms of offering a productive, satisfying end-user experience.
Dan O'Farrell
VP of Product Marketing, IGEL

THE DIGITAL EXPERIENCE-CENTRIC ORGANIZATION

Companies will become increasingly digital and experience-focused to thrive. The pandemic showed every company that its ability to survive was closely attached to the use of digital touchpoints to connect and service customers. Companies had to double-down on digital tools, improve their skills for managing digital experiences, and change operational processes and business models to adopt this digital-first approach. The pandemic-induced digital acceleration has only increased the pressure on every company to become a digital, experience-centric organization.
Will Payman
Senior Director, Strategy Customer Experience, Synoptek

CONVERGENCE OF DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT WITH HELPDESK

2023 will be the year of convergence — where the markets are colliding. Currently, ITSM and ITOM product line of business convergence is being witnessed. In the coming year, digital experience management blended with helpdesk functions like remote assistance will converge with service management.
Sree Subramaniam
Sr Dir, Inbound Product Mgmt, ITOM, ServiceNow

NEED FOR DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY

As many as 19 million Americans are excluded when digital experiences are not designed with disabled people in mind. 62% of those who use assistive technologies — like screen readers, tactile keyboards and more — say they frequently experience errors on a given day and 44% of those who use this tech experience errors that keep them from accomplishing a task on a daily basis. Many organizations haven't focused on ensuring their tech is available and accessible to everyone, making them behind on their digital accessibility journey. In 2023, we expect companies who are not prioritizing digital accessibility to lose users extensively in favor of companies who are ensuring their websites, applications, digital documents and more are readily available for all their users — including those with disabilities — and putting steam into testing for digital accessibility. For those organizations who haven't given the care and attention needed in this area, we're expecting to see them launching new efforts to incorporate digital accessibility into their brands.
Marcus Merrell
VP of Technology Strategy, Sauce Labs

END-USER TOLERANCE FOR ERRORS CONTINUES TO DECLINE

User experience affects our everyday lives — and brands' bottom lines. ccording to a recent data study, nearly a quarter of consumers (23%) say they encounter an error or experience issue that keeps them from accomplishing a task online at least once a day, which is highly detrimental to brand trust and customer loyalty. With early 1 in 5 (18%) users saying they won't wait any length of time for an error to be fixed, they'll simply go somewhere else, and as tech becomes evermore pervasive, we expect end user tolerance for errors to continue to decline—making this a top priority for IT leaders.
Marcus Merrell
VP of Technology Strategy, Sauce Labs

CONNECTING THE DOTS BETWEEN CRASH AND ERROR REPORTING

How users interact with our applications and their experience with them has always been a factor in development. However, over time, the emphasis placed on user experience over other factors has ebbed and flowed. That will change as users will continue to expect smoother and faster experiences with applications and will have less tolerance when their apps fail to comply. This means organizations will need greater visibility into not just crashes and the errors associated with them, but the performance issues that are as good as a crash, like slow screen loads and frozen apps. I predict we will begin to see more emphasis on teams trying to connect the dots between crash and error reporting and performance issues to get the full picture of the user experience with their application, and a true(r) readout of their apps' performance.
Michael Olechna
Product Marketing Manager, SmartBear

WEB3 MAKES USER EXPERIENCE EVEN MORE CRITICAL

Applications and systems will continue to be at the core of modern business in 2023, and the issues that end-users face, including slowed performance or downtime, will now have real consequences felt across the entire organization, especially as businesses ramp up digital transformation into Web3. To ensure Web3 transformation goes confidently, it's critical to have the right tooling for efficient and effective development, which in turn lowers spend and speeds up delivery times. Performance and load testing tools are designed to provide testers and developers with the ability to simplify and scale performance engineering across the organization, streamlining the transformation process.
Grigori Melnik
EVP & Chief Strategy Officer, Tricentis

CONVERGENCE OF TESTING AND APM

2023 will see the beginnings of a convergence of testing and APM. We're starting to see consolidation in both the market and in the personas we're all chasing. Testing companies are offering monitoring, and monitoring companies are offering testing. This is a natural outcome of the industry's desire to move toward true observability: deep understanding of real-world user behavior, synthetic user testing, passively watching for signals and doing real-time root cause analysis–all in service of perfecting the customer experience. The widespread and rapid adoption of OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing (and their implementation into many testing tools) is indicative of what's coming.
Ryan Vesely
VP of Global Solution Engineering, Sauce Labs

Go to: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 8, the final installment, covering NetOps and Network Performance Management.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Why VM and Container Monitoring Is Not Enough for Cloud-Hosted Autonomous Agents

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

Beyond Monitoring: Why IT Operations Must Evolve into Decision Operations

Enterprise IT environments have never been more observable ... Yet many organizations still grapple with outages, lengthy incident resolution cycles, and increasing complexity. Most teams do not suffer from a shortage of data. They struggle to determine what deserves attention and what action to take next ... Enterprise IT operations must move beyond monitoring and visibility. The next stage of maturity is decision operations, an approach that helps teams make faster, better-informed decisions ...

2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 7

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, AIOps, Observability, OpenTelemetry and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2023. Part 7 covers the user experience.

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 6

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT MOVES UP THE PRIORITY LIST IN 2023

Digital experience management (DEM) has become extremely important over the past year, as it has a direct impact on employee attraction and retention. The new world of widely distributed workforces and hybrid work has placed a greater burden on IT teams to make sure employees remain productive and satisfied in their work. We predict that DEM will continue to move up the priority list and garner more IT budget in the coming years as HR departments will be looking to the CIO and the IT organization to remain competitive in terms of offering a productive, satisfying end-user experience.
Dan O'Farrell
VP of Product Marketing, IGEL

THE DIGITAL EXPERIENCE-CENTRIC ORGANIZATION

Companies will become increasingly digital and experience-focused to thrive. The pandemic showed every company that its ability to survive was closely attached to the use of digital touchpoints to connect and service customers. Companies had to double-down on digital tools, improve their skills for managing digital experiences, and change operational processes and business models to adopt this digital-first approach. The pandemic-induced digital acceleration has only increased the pressure on every company to become a digital, experience-centric organization.
Will Payman
Senior Director, Strategy Customer Experience, Synoptek

CONVERGENCE OF DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT WITH HELPDESK

2023 will be the year of convergence — where the markets are colliding. Currently, ITSM and ITOM product line of business convergence is being witnessed. In the coming year, digital experience management blended with helpdesk functions like remote assistance will converge with service management.
Sree Subramaniam
Sr Dir, Inbound Product Mgmt, ITOM, ServiceNow

NEED FOR DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY

As many as 19 million Americans are excluded when digital experiences are not designed with disabled people in mind. 62% of those who use assistive technologies — like screen readers, tactile keyboards and more — say they frequently experience errors on a given day and 44% of those who use this tech experience errors that keep them from accomplishing a task on a daily basis. Many organizations haven't focused on ensuring their tech is available and accessible to everyone, making them behind on their digital accessibility journey. In 2023, we expect companies who are not prioritizing digital accessibility to lose users extensively in favor of companies who are ensuring their websites, applications, digital documents and more are readily available for all their users — including those with disabilities — and putting steam into testing for digital accessibility. For those organizations who haven't given the care and attention needed in this area, we're expecting to see them launching new efforts to incorporate digital accessibility into their brands.
Marcus Merrell
VP of Technology Strategy, Sauce Labs

END-USER TOLERANCE FOR ERRORS CONTINUES TO DECLINE

User experience affects our everyday lives — and brands' bottom lines. ccording to a recent data study, nearly a quarter of consumers (23%) say they encounter an error or experience issue that keeps them from accomplishing a task online at least once a day, which is highly detrimental to brand trust and customer loyalty. With early 1 in 5 (18%) users saying they won't wait any length of time for an error to be fixed, they'll simply go somewhere else, and as tech becomes evermore pervasive, we expect end user tolerance for errors to continue to decline—making this a top priority for IT leaders.
Marcus Merrell
VP of Technology Strategy, Sauce Labs

CONNECTING THE DOTS BETWEEN CRASH AND ERROR REPORTING

How users interact with our applications and their experience with them has always been a factor in development. However, over time, the emphasis placed on user experience over other factors has ebbed and flowed. That will change as users will continue to expect smoother and faster experiences with applications and will have less tolerance when their apps fail to comply. This means organizations will need greater visibility into not just crashes and the errors associated with them, but the performance issues that are as good as a crash, like slow screen loads and frozen apps. I predict we will begin to see more emphasis on teams trying to connect the dots between crash and error reporting and performance issues to get the full picture of the user experience with their application, and a true(r) readout of their apps' performance.
Michael Olechna
Product Marketing Manager, SmartBear

WEB3 MAKES USER EXPERIENCE EVEN MORE CRITICAL

Applications and systems will continue to be at the core of modern business in 2023, and the issues that end-users face, including slowed performance or downtime, will now have real consequences felt across the entire organization, especially as businesses ramp up digital transformation into Web3. To ensure Web3 transformation goes confidently, it's critical to have the right tooling for efficient and effective development, which in turn lowers spend and speeds up delivery times. Performance and load testing tools are designed to provide testers and developers with the ability to simplify and scale performance engineering across the organization, streamlining the transformation process.
Grigori Melnik
EVP & Chief Strategy Officer, Tricentis

CONVERGENCE OF TESTING AND APM

2023 will see the beginnings of a convergence of testing and APM. We're starting to see consolidation in both the market and in the personas we're all chasing. Testing companies are offering monitoring, and monitoring companies are offering testing. This is a natural outcome of the industry's desire to move toward true observability: deep understanding of real-world user behavior, synthetic user testing, passively watching for signals and doing real-time root cause analysis–all in service of perfecting the customer experience. The widespread and rapid adoption of OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing (and their implementation into many testing tools) is indicative of what's coming.
Ryan Vesely
VP of Global Solution Engineering, Sauce Labs

Go to: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 8, the final installment, covering NetOps and Network Performance Management.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Why VM and Container Monitoring Is Not Enough for Cloud-Hosted Autonomous Agents

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

Beyond Monitoring: Why IT Operations Must Evolve into Decision Operations

Enterprise IT environments have never been more observable ... Yet many organizations still grapple with outages, lengthy incident resolution cycles, and increasing complexity. Most teams do not suffer from a shortage of data. They struggle to determine what deserves attention and what action to take next ... Enterprise IT operations must move beyond monitoring and visibility. The next stage of maturity is decision operations, an approach that helps teams make faster, better-informed decisions ...