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16 Ways Application Performance Impacts the Business - Part 3

APMdigest asked experts from across Application Performance Management (APM) and related markets what they see as the most important way application performance impacts the business. The third installment covers the internal impacts of application performance on your teams.

Start with 16 Ways Application Performance Impacts the Business - Part 1

Start with 16 Ways Application Performance Impacts the Business - Part 2

9. PRODUCTIVITY

Today, company productivity hinges on the smooth operation of numerous applications. Collaboration platforms, proprietary applications, business software — if any of these critical systems are interrrupted, productivity can grind to a halt. That's why it makes sense for companies to permanently monitor the performance of these vital technology tools, including applications, email systems, data backup solutions and security updates.
Dirk Paessler
CEO, Paessler AG

Application performance is at the heart of business — today, almost every function in an organization depends on a piece of software, which creates direct dependency between application performance; productivity; and ultimately, revenue. To illustrate, a recent SolarWinds survey found that 93% of end users say application performance affects their ability to do their job, with 62% saying it's absolutely critical. To ensure peak application performance, IT needs to build a performance discipline with end-user performance as a shared goal across the entire team and with increased visibility into performance metrics and bottlenecks across each element of the application stack.
Gerardo Dada
VP, Product Marketing and Strategy, SolarWinds

The rise of business critical and revenue critical mobile apps means that poor app performance has a direct impact on business performance. Failures with employee-facing apps can lead employees to abandon them, and revert to the previously inefficient and expensive processes. For example, an airlines bug grounded planes and forced the crew to return to the gate to print flight plans.
Andrew Levy
CEO and Co-Founder, Crittercism

10. QUALITY SERVICE

Application performance is one of the most critical elements for delivering quality service to end users. Every service disruption creates a negative impression about the company (or department) to each user, as it reduces effectiveness, productivity and trust. Similarly, falling short on application performance expectations can be very damaging to a business’ productivity and profitability. By limiting or eliminating performance issues, software teams can enhance the effectiveness of the application and focus development efforts directly on improvements to functionality.
Srinivas Ramanathan
CEO, eG Innovations

11. COLLABORATION

Unified Communications solutions are tools and processes that allow people to work together anytime across offices, cities and countries. Collaboration solutions are the lifeblood of every modern organization where rapid communication can make or break a business. Poor application performance can directly impact how people can effectively work together. Monitoring the quality of the experience ensures the best user experience and productive collaboration.
Ulrica de Fort-Menares
VP of Product Strategy, LiveAction

12. INNOVATION

In today's on-demand market a poor application performance is not just a quality problem — it's a revenue impacting problem. The impacts of poor applications are many, from recurring downtime and revenue risks to losing customers and loyalty. One of the most important ones in my view is its effect on productivity and innovation. Application performance problems not only impact you, but also your IT development team. The more time the IT team spends to fix a broken application, the less it spends on thinking ahead on potential opportunities.
Chris Smith
COO, Idera

Read 16 Ways Application Performance Impacts the Business - Part 4, the final installment of the list, covering business impacts you might not have thought about.

Hot Topics

The Latest

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

16 Ways Application Performance Impacts the Business - Part 3

APMdigest asked experts from across Application Performance Management (APM) and related markets what they see as the most important way application performance impacts the business. The third installment covers the internal impacts of application performance on your teams.

Start with 16 Ways Application Performance Impacts the Business - Part 1

Start with 16 Ways Application Performance Impacts the Business - Part 2

9. PRODUCTIVITY

Today, company productivity hinges on the smooth operation of numerous applications. Collaboration platforms, proprietary applications, business software — if any of these critical systems are interrrupted, productivity can grind to a halt. That's why it makes sense for companies to permanently monitor the performance of these vital technology tools, including applications, email systems, data backup solutions and security updates.
Dirk Paessler
CEO, Paessler AG

Application performance is at the heart of business — today, almost every function in an organization depends on a piece of software, which creates direct dependency between application performance; productivity; and ultimately, revenue. To illustrate, a recent SolarWinds survey found that 93% of end users say application performance affects their ability to do their job, with 62% saying it's absolutely critical. To ensure peak application performance, IT needs to build a performance discipline with end-user performance as a shared goal across the entire team and with increased visibility into performance metrics and bottlenecks across each element of the application stack.
Gerardo Dada
VP, Product Marketing and Strategy, SolarWinds

The rise of business critical and revenue critical mobile apps means that poor app performance has a direct impact on business performance. Failures with employee-facing apps can lead employees to abandon them, and revert to the previously inefficient and expensive processes. For example, an airlines bug grounded planes and forced the crew to return to the gate to print flight plans.
Andrew Levy
CEO and Co-Founder, Crittercism

10. QUALITY SERVICE

Application performance is one of the most critical elements for delivering quality service to end users. Every service disruption creates a negative impression about the company (or department) to each user, as it reduces effectiveness, productivity and trust. Similarly, falling short on application performance expectations can be very damaging to a business’ productivity and profitability. By limiting or eliminating performance issues, software teams can enhance the effectiveness of the application and focus development efforts directly on improvements to functionality.
Srinivas Ramanathan
CEO, eG Innovations

11. COLLABORATION

Unified Communications solutions are tools and processes that allow people to work together anytime across offices, cities and countries. Collaboration solutions are the lifeblood of every modern organization where rapid communication can make or break a business. Poor application performance can directly impact how people can effectively work together. Monitoring the quality of the experience ensures the best user experience and productive collaboration.
Ulrica de Fort-Menares
VP of Product Strategy, LiveAction

12. INNOVATION

In today's on-demand market a poor application performance is not just a quality problem — it's a revenue impacting problem. The impacts of poor applications are many, from recurring downtime and revenue risks to losing customers and loyalty. One of the most important ones in my view is its effect on productivity and innovation. Application performance problems not only impact you, but also your IT development team. The more time the IT team spends to fix a broken application, the less it spends on thinking ahead on potential opportunities.
Chris Smith
COO, Idera

Read 16 Ways Application Performance Impacts the Business - Part 4, the final installment of the list, covering business impacts you might not have thought about.

Hot Topics

The Latest

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.