8 Performance Management Predictions for 2015

Srinivas Ramanathan
Learn more about eG Innovations

eG Innovations released key predictions for the Application Performance Management (APM) industry in 2015.

Resolving IT pain and avoiding unscheduled downtime is the traditional focus of our industry and will continue to be important, but cloud, mobility, SaaS and other emerging technologies like virtually shared storage are reinventing the role of the modern CIO. APM solutions must support emerging technologies and help CIOs manage and plan for future innovation, transformation and validate the value delivered to the business. CIOs will depend on APM solutions to prevent drains on CAPEX and ensure they are contributing to OPINC. The modern CIO will concentrate on these key initiatives, all of which are tied to having universal insight across the enterprise.

1. Workspace flexibility will increase exponentially in 2015

IT executives are being challenged to adopt and integrate mobile solutions at a blinding pace but 70% of end user devices cannot pass basic compliance and security tests, so introducing foreign devices on the corporate network poses serious risks. CIOs will need to ensure availability while managing access, device and user compliance and security, having universal insight across user and device profiles, approved and blacklisted apps, databases and domains will be critical to success.

2. The borderless enterprise explosion will usher in a new era of compliance and security

The gaps and interdependencies between cloud, mobility, virtual and shared infrastructures, social media platforms and SaaS will inspire a renewed focus on compliance and security the way email, malware and network security have before. APM providers will be faced with some interesting choices like whether to acquire or develop additional internal compliance and security expertise, partner with an existing security provider or remain focused on their existing silo niche. CIOs will be left with deciding to go all-in with a security provider, purchase silo-centric solutions that provide limited compliance and security visibility, or evaluate and choose an APM/NPM solution that meets most of their needs now as APM NPM compliance and security maturity continues to grow.

3. It's all about end user experience and enhancing IT service performance

End users judge their experience relative to their ability to be productive and complete an end goal. Whether the end user is an employee seeking to work seamlessly between the office and a mobile device as they move across domains or a customer accessing a web cart, they all expect apps and databases to be available, accessible and responsive. CIOs will rely heavily on APM solutions to provide KPI for user logons, average response time, page loads, app adoption, abandonment rates and other correlated metrics to ensure that end users are happy and productive.

4. CIOs will be recognized as the King of corporate KPI

What started with call center, helpdesk and customer service metrics is expanding rapidly. APM solutions that can be adapted to collect KPI for industry and role specific applications are influencing the decision making of CEOs, CFOs and other executives. APM solutions will be used to measure and determine the viability of pilot programs, industrial expansion and even the purchase of competing intellectual properties.

5. CIOs Improve operational efficiency with APM

Reliance on command line interfaces and technology trees is functional but outdated. CIOs will arm and empower IT managers, admins and specialists with APM solutions that are customizable, intuitive, integrate easily with existing NOC tools and provide a unified view of the enterprise. The end goal will be to accelerate time to resolution, eliminate guesswork, reduce dependency on multiple silo-centric tools with limited visibility and mitigate the impact that natural attrition has on tribal knowledge.

6. CIOS Ensure IT effectiveness and business alignment via APM

CIOs must align IT initiatives with desired business outcomes for productivity, growth and profit. APM historical performance reports provide the empirical data they need to help them balance workloads, right-size the enterprise and eliminate cost overruns so capacity planning meets the business needs of today while preparing for the emerging technologies of tomorrow.

7. XaaS becomes the new IT stack for Hybrid Cloud

The era of everything as a service has arrived. The development of virtual cloud and mobility apps are driving IT innovation and the consolidation of intellectual properties at a blinding pace. To maintain market share and demonstrate thought leadership traditional product centric companies will accelerate efforts to bring new XaaS offerings to market. The rollout and adoption of new service offerings like vDaaS, DRaaS, IaaS, MWaaS, PaaS, and WPaaS with grow and mature in 2015 and throughout the remainder of the decade.

8. Containerization remains a test and development play, for now

Game changer, disruptive and death knell are all phrases tossed about when containerization solutions are discussed as an alternative to traditional virtualization but the reality is much less dramatic. Container solutions are well suited for accelerating Linux app portability and reducing associated overhead, Google and Facebook have deployed containers very successfully but their demands for rapid deployment and scale are different from most corporate customers. Until container solutions are cross compatible, offer mature management options and enhanced security capabilities expect containers to remain a solution for Linux test and development environments while traditional VMs meet the majority of data center production demands.

Universal insight matters, its inherent value is undeniable. It will play a significant role in driving, supporting and ensuring the success of these key CIO initiatives in 2015.

Srinivas Ramanathan is CEO and Founder of eG Innovations.

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

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 ...

8 Performance Management Predictions for 2015

Srinivas Ramanathan
Learn more about eG Innovations

eG Innovations released key predictions for the Application Performance Management (APM) industry in 2015.

Resolving IT pain and avoiding unscheduled downtime is the traditional focus of our industry and will continue to be important, but cloud, mobility, SaaS and other emerging technologies like virtually shared storage are reinventing the role of the modern CIO. APM solutions must support emerging technologies and help CIOs manage and plan for future innovation, transformation and validate the value delivered to the business. CIOs will depend on APM solutions to prevent drains on CAPEX and ensure they are contributing to OPINC. The modern CIO will concentrate on these key initiatives, all of which are tied to having universal insight across the enterprise.

1. Workspace flexibility will increase exponentially in 2015

IT executives are being challenged to adopt and integrate mobile solutions at a blinding pace but 70% of end user devices cannot pass basic compliance and security tests, so introducing foreign devices on the corporate network poses serious risks. CIOs will need to ensure availability while managing access, device and user compliance and security, having universal insight across user and device profiles, approved and blacklisted apps, databases and domains will be critical to success.

2. The borderless enterprise explosion will usher in a new era of compliance and security

The gaps and interdependencies between cloud, mobility, virtual and shared infrastructures, social media platforms and SaaS will inspire a renewed focus on compliance and security the way email, malware and network security have before. APM providers will be faced with some interesting choices like whether to acquire or develop additional internal compliance and security expertise, partner with an existing security provider or remain focused on their existing silo niche. CIOs will be left with deciding to go all-in with a security provider, purchase silo-centric solutions that provide limited compliance and security visibility, or evaluate and choose an APM/NPM solution that meets most of their needs now as APM NPM compliance and security maturity continues to grow.

3. It's all about end user experience and enhancing IT service performance

End users judge their experience relative to their ability to be productive and complete an end goal. Whether the end user is an employee seeking to work seamlessly between the office and a mobile device as they move across domains or a customer accessing a web cart, they all expect apps and databases to be available, accessible and responsive. CIOs will rely heavily on APM solutions to provide KPI for user logons, average response time, page loads, app adoption, abandonment rates and other correlated metrics to ensure that end users are happy and productive.

4. CIOs will be recognized as the King of corporate KPI

What started with call center, helpdesk and customer service metrics is expanding rapidly. APM solutions that can be adapted to collect KPI for industry and role specific applications are influencing the decision making of CEOs, CFOs and other executives. APM solutions will be used to measure and determine the viability of pilot programs, industrial expansion and even the purchase of competing intellectual properties.

5. CIOs Improve operational efficiency with APM

Reliance on command line interfaces and technology trees is functional but outdated. CIOs will arm and empower IT managers, admins and specialists with APM solutions that are customizable, intuitive, integrate easily with existing NOC tools and provide a unified view of the enterprise. The end goal will be to accelerate time to resolution, eliminate guesswork, reduce dependency on multiple silo-centric tools with limited visibility and mitigate the impact that natural attrition has on tribal knowledge.

6. CIOS Ensure IT effectiveness and business alignment via APM

CIOs must align IT initiatives with desired business outcomes for productivity, growth and profit. APM historical performance reports provide the empirical data they need to help them balance workloads, right-size the enterprise and eliminate cost overruns so capacity planning meets the business needs of today while preparing for the emerging technologies of tomorrow.

7. XaaS becomes the new IT stack for Hybrid Cloud

The era of everything as a service has arrived. The development of virtual cloud and mobility apps are driving IT innovation and the consolidation of intellectual properties at a blinding pace. To maintain market share and demonstrate thought leadership traditional product centric companies will accelerate efforts to bring new XaaS offerings to market. The rollout and adoption of new service offerings like vDaaS, DRaaS, IaaS, MWaaS, PaaS, and WPaaS with grow and mature in 2015 and throughout the remainder of the decade.

8. Containerization remains a test and development play, for now

Game changer, disruptive and death knell are all phrases tossed about when containerization solutions are discussed as an alternative to traditional virtualization but the reality is much less dramatic. Container solutions are well suited for accelerating Linux app portability and reducing associated overhead, Google and Facebook have deployed containers very successfully but their demands for rapid deployment and scale are different from most corporate customers. Until container solutions are cross compatible, offer mature management options and enhanced security capabilities expect containers to remain a solution for Linux test and development environments while traditional VMs meet the majority of data center production demands.

Universal insight matters, its inherent value is undeniable. It will play a significant role in driving, supporting and ensuring the success of these key CIO initiatives in 2015.

Srinivas Ramanathan is CEO and Founder of eG Innovations.

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

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 ...