In Part Two of APMdigest's exclusive interview, Bill Berutti, President, Performance & Availability, BMC Software, presents a vision of the future for Application Performance Management involving SaaS, mobility, cloud and Social IT.

Start with Part One of the interview

APM: How important will APM SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) be in the future?

BB: APM solutions will offer an increasing number of SaaS options. For key APM capabilities such as synthetic end-user experience monitoring, SaaS is the default approach for many customers. For backend application analysis, a hybrid model is of interest because it allows for collection agents to be used in the customer's environment while providing for a hosted platform that removes the burden of installing, managing and updating a vendor solution.

In the future, companies will innovate to provide more APM capabilities through SaaS models until this becomes the primary approach for APM deployment.

APM: Where does Social IT fit into the future of APM?

BB: Social IT is a reality. The ability for users to instantly begin tackling an issue directly with an IT expert has become an expectation. This new state of "reactive chaos" has pushed the need for IT Operations to have a full understanding and clear role in resolving application performance management issues. In a sense, Social IT is expanding the traditional APM market.

Expanding the definition of social IT to include the ability to socialize data – to crowd-source and use the power of many to not only identify common issues, but also to identify resolutions quickly will require APM solutions to expand data sources for resolution. Moving beyond the traditional user experience inputs and leveraging the power of crowd-sourced data could become a requirement given the growing complexity of application technology.

APM: What type of crowd source data would be valuable to APM? Are you talking about user experience?

BB: Crowd source data from both a user experience and problem resolution experience will prove to add value to Application Performance Management.

From a user experience perspective, many end users currently share their experience - not with the application or service providers but rather on communities or social media sites. Capturing this information and accounting for this as businesses evaluate and adjust for a positive end user experience will prove difficult but necessary.

From a resolution perspective, leveraging the power of other IT professionals experience to quickly solve a problem could become a powerful tool. An application or service issue that one IT team has gone through the effort to understand and resolve could be a quick solution for another if only documented, shared and easily accessed by another team.

APM: Do you see APM in general becoming more self-service oriented for business stakeholders in the near future?

BB: Yes. IT Operations will continue to play a primary role in ensuring a service not only remains up and running but is also performing at the necessary levels. There is a definite trend with business stakeholders taking a more active role in the performance management of their end-user services. With that in mind, it will become necessary for stakeholders to clearly understand the performance of their business at any given time. The need for an easy to use and understand dashboard that highlights a business perspective will likely become a requirement.

APM: What is the answer to the APM challenge of mobility?

BB: The challenge of managing the performance and availability of mobile apps will shift away from third-party support to a centralized IT support structure. The ability to quickly adapt and support services on the ever-evolving mobile device market will require an APM solution that provides consistency and structure to IT Operations. APM solutions must eliminate complexity in support of mobile services allowing IT to support rapid changes in mobile technology. A consistent solution that can be leveraged across all mobile devices and traditional application management services must be created.

APM: How can APM adequately address the cloud challenge?

BB: APM helps customers move to the cloud by providing an end-to-end perspective of cloud performance without requiring traditional monitoring agents for many use cases. APM can model baseline user performance before and after moving into the cloud, especially hybrid and public clouds, and alert IT of performance issues that result from this move. This will enable IT to isolate issues and re-provision or tune to ensure service levels are met.

By integrating APM with a leading cloud management platform, IT operations can plan and provision the type of infrastructure as a service required to meet user performance expectations and thus encourage greater adoption of cloud computing.

APM: How will BMC's APM product change over the next few years?

BB: Recognizing the shift toward IT Operations support of Application Performance Management, BMC has extended its focus beyond application owners to include IT Operations allowing this critical organization to properly manage application performance.

This summer, BMC released new technology that leverages all data available to understand and analyze the user experience and quickly determine the root cause of any issue. This new IT data analytics functionality discovers and utilizes data found in unstructured files and then uses the powerful BMC analytics engine to correlate this information back with critical monitoring and management information.

Over the next year, we will continue to build on this new technology making it easier than ever to quickly access and translate information stored in unstructured files.

BMC also is working to deliver a single interface that correlates information from critical monitoring and management technology with the user experience by providing IT Operations an easy and consistent method to leverage the tools necessary to properly support critical business services.

APM: What do you predict for the APM market over the next few years?

BB: We believe the investment focus in the APM market will start to shift toward mobile user experience monitoring, toward greater use of big data for insight into application performance and toward greater use of SaaS models. APM will extend to cover more monitoring use cases until the tools evolve into a simple unified monitoring solution that enables IT to manage infrastructure, applications and end users from a single pane of glass.

ABOUT Bill Berutti

Bill Berutti joined BMC Software as President of the Performance and Availability product line in April 2014. Prior to joining BMC, Berutti was at PTC where he was EVP of the $200 million Service Lifecycle Management unit, the company’s fastest growing business. As GM of SLM, Berutti doubled the size of the business over two years through both organic and acquired growth. His 17-year career at PTC also included senior leadership roles as head of PTC’s first business unit as well as in corporate development, marketing and sales. Berutti began his career at Wallace Computer Services where he was a successful sales leader. Berutti holds a bachelor of science in business administration from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and he is a graduate of Harvard Business School’s Finance for Senior Executives program. He served as a board member of City Year Boston from 2003 to 2012, and he is an alumni volunteer for Miami University.