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16 Ways Application Performance Impacts the Business - Part 4

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 fourth and final installment covers business impacts you might not have thought about.

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

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

Start with 16 Ways Application Performance Impacts the Business - Part 3

13. EXPENSES

Application performance and service assurance are critical to business success since they impact the OpEx and CapEx associated with managing performance. Increased OpEx and CapEx are closely associated with an inadequate monitoring tool strategy and proliferation of disparate data sets that inhibit end-to-end service visibility and prevent a common situational awareness for the IT organization. On the other hand, fast triage of application and service performance problems will reduce IT expenses and make employees more productive, and also allow businesses to compete and innovate with confidence.
Ron Lifton
Senior Solutions Marketing Manager, NetScout

14. CONNECTED APPLICATIONS

As applications continue to become more critical to the line of business, they are also becoming increasingly interconnected. These loosely coupled applications are often owned and developed by different teams in different locations in different organizations. Loose coupling helps achieve agility but it comes with additional risk. A single application may have a cascading effect which will have larger impact on the overall business. In 2016, the increasing inter-application dependencies will lead to increased outages and unexpected performance issues. Enterprises should look for ways to consolidate technology silos and monitoring silos to mitigate this risk.
Russ Elsner
Consulting Architect, Office of the CTO, ScienceLogic

15. STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS

Today's apps rely on more than just your own product or service, but multiple third parties to increase functionality and improve performance, such as incorporating payments, geolocation or social sharing APIs. A pronounced way that application performance impacts the business is by opening the door to these strategic partnerships and technical integrations. It's a two-sided coin — your app performance improves by incorporating more complementary third-party services, but when one of those services goes down or fails, even though your own infrastructure isn't to blame, your customers can have a poor experience. The ecosystem of third-party APIs is a boon to business development, but also puts more responsibility on the part of app developers and QA teams.
Neil Mansilla
VP of Developer Relations, Runscope

16. DIGITAL BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

Historically, IT operations focus on availability and performance was motivated by responding to — or preventing — outages involving the physical infrastructure that supports applications. Given the rapid adoption of virtual and cloud infrastructures, and the automation and redundancy benefits they afford, organizations are increasingly focused on application performance and end-user experience. I love the expression "slow is the new down" as it succinctly captures the growing emphasis organizations are placing on applications and users as companies transform to becoming digital businesses.
Marcus MacNeill
VP, Product Management, Zenoss

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 4

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 fourth and final installment covers business impacts you might not have thought about.

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

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

Start with 16 Ways Application Performance Impacts the Business - Part 3

13. EXPENSES

Application performance and service assurance are critical to business success since they impact the OpEx and CapEx associated with managing performance. Increased OpEx and CapEx are closely associated with an inadequate monitoring tool strategy and proliferation of disparate data sets that inhibit end-to-end service visibility and prevent a common situational awareness for the IT organization. On the other hand, fast triage of application and service performance problems will reduce IT expenses and make employees more productive, and also allow businesses to compete and innovate with confidence.
Ron Lifton
Senior Solutions Marketing Manager, NetScout

14. CONNECTED APPLICATIONS

As applications continue to become more critical to the line of business, they are also becoming increasingly interconnected. These loosely coupled applications are often owned and developed by different teams in different locations in different organizations. Loose coupling helps achieve agility but it comes with additional risk. A single application may have a cascading effect which will have larger impact on the overall business. In 2016, the increasing inter-application dependencies will lead to increased outages and unexpected performance issues. Enterprises should look for ways to consolidate technology silos and monitoring silos to mitigate this risk.
Russ Elsner
Consulting Architect, Office of the CTO, ScienceLogic

15. STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS

Today's apps rely on more than just your own product or service, but multiple third parties to increase functionality and improve performance, such as incorporating payments, geolocation or social sharing APIs. A pronounced way that application performance impacts the business is by opening the door to these strategic partnerships and technical integrations. It's a two-sided coin — your app performance improves by incorporating more complementary third-party services, but when one of those services goes down or fails, even though your own infrastructure isn't to blame, your customers can have a poor experience. The ecosystem of third-party APIs is a boon to business development, but also puts more responsibility on the part of app developers and QA teams.
Neil Mansilla
VP of Developer Relations, Runscope

16. DIGITAL BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

Historically, IT operations focus on availability and performance was motivated by responding to — or preventing — outages involving the physical infrastructure that supports applications. Given the rapid adoption of virtual and cloud infrastructures, and the automation and redundancy benefits they afford, organizations are increasingly focused on application performance and end-user experience. I love the expression "slow is the new down" as it succinctly captures the growing emphasis organizations are placing on applications and users as companies transform to becoming digital businesses.
Marcus MacNeill
VP, Product Management, Zenoss

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.