Skip to main content

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

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...

We just surveyed 300 frontend and mobile engineers across 16 countries, and the finding that keeps sticking with me isn't the one about AI. It's this: 74% of engineering teams rate themselves in the "middle" of the observability maturity scale. Not reactive, not strategic. Stuck in the middle. They have dashboards, they have tracing, they have alerts. And yet when something goes wrong, they still can't tell you why ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 25, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses  AI's impact on the Wide Area Network (WAN) ... 

Application performance monitoring (APM) dashboards are only as useful as what they are configured to measure. The default setup covers obvious failure modes such as downtime, error spikes, and latency breaches, but it does not cover everything. Some failures produce no alerts or anomalies. The dashboard stays green while users experience a broken product. Here are six signs that is happening ...

The race to deploy AI is largely over. Most enterprises have entered it. The question now is not whether artificial intelligence is running inside the organization. The question is whether anyone is genuinely responsible for what it does. That is not a technical question. It is a leadership one. And most organizations are not yet structured to answer it honestly ...

A new analysis of 250 real-world queries across common retail tasks, such as product pricing, availability, ratings, shipping and specifications, reveals systemic inefficiency at the heart of web-based AI agents. On average, 97.9% of the data retrieved by agents from live web pages is irrelevant to the query being answered. Specifically, the average page ingested ran nearly 9,000 characters, while the average answer was just 32 characters, resulting in a noise-to-signal ratio of 278:1. Price queries were the most extreme outlier, with noise rates approaching 99.5%. That's not a rounding error. That's a structural problem ...

The enterprises that will define the next decade are not the ones that deployed the most technology. They are the ones who understood what their technology was actually doing. That distinction is not a philosophical point. It is the central operational challenge facing every organization that has spent the last five years modernizing at speed ...

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

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

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...

We just surveyed 300 frontend and mobile engineers across 16 countries, and the finding that keeps sticking with me isn't the one about AI. It's this: 74% of engineering teams rate themselves in the "middle" of the observability maturity scale. Not reactive, not strategic. Stuck in the middle. They have dashboards, they have tracing, they have alerts. And yet when something goes wrong, they still can't tell you why ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 25, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses  AI's impact on the Wide Area Network (WAN) ... 

Application performance monitoring (APM) dashboards are only as useful as what they are configured to measure. The default setup covers obvious failure modes such as downtime, error spikes, and latency breaches, but it does not cover everything. Some failures produce no alerts or anomalies. The dashboard stays green while users experience a broken product. Here are six signs that is happening ...

The race to deploy AI is largely over. Most enterprises have entered it. The question now is not whether artificial intelligence is running inside the organization. The question is whether anyone is genuinely responsible for what it does. That is not a technical question. It is a leadership one. And most organizations are not yet structured to answer it honestly ...

A new analysis of 250 real-world queries across common retail tasks, such as product pricing, availability, ratings, shipping and specifications, reveals systemic inefficiency at the heart of web-based AI agents. On average, 97.9% of the data retrieved by agents from live web pages is irrelevant to the query being answered. Specifically, the average page ingested ran nearly 9,000 characters, while the average answer was just 32 characters, resulting in a noise-to-signal ratio of 278:1. Price queries were the most extreme outlier, with noise rates approaching 99.5%. That's not a rounding error. That's a structural problem ...

The enterprises that will define the next decade are not the ones that deployed the most technology. They are the ones who understood what their technology was actually doing. That distinction is not a philosophical point. It is the central operational challenge facing every organization that has spent the last five years modernizing at speed ...

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...