It's a new year and the fight for market share amongst all enterprises has never been fiercer. Organizations compete for customers on multiple fronts — in person, on the web, and via mobile applications. Today, it's not enough to churn out applications, products, and services faster than the competition. Anything that fails to meet a high performance standard could cause a serious loss of brand value, revenue, and the ability to attract and maintain customers and competitive advantage.

Below are three predictions for what we can expect in 2016:

1. Load Testing will move to the cloud

In 2016, we'll see more enterprises moving load testing to the cloud. Companies are under constant pressure to deliver products and services to the market faster than ever before. Meanwhile, business owners are exhausted by in-house IT departments with slow delivery cycles. In this dichotomy, performance must not be sacrificed. By using load testing from the cloud capabilities, the business and technology teams both get what they need: Technology gets an affordable, secure way to test system and application performance before it reaches production, and the business doesn't have to wait so long that it loses competitive advantage.

2. Enterprises will prioritize lifecycle virtualization

Organizations today are expected to deliver quality products and services to market on time, and therefore, they must have the ability to virtualize production conditions and ensure their solutions are ready for prime time. For instance, releasing a buggy video-streaming application can have major consequences, but imagine the ramifications of releasing autonomous vehicle software that causes a self-driving car to blow through red lights — or a home security system that can be overridden by a simple hack. In 2015, less than half of performance and development professionals used Release Quality as a baseline metric to judge application performance, according to a report sponsored by HPE and blind survey executed by YouGov. This number is expected to rise in 2016 as organizations fully appreciate that there are no second chances with respect to making a strong first impression based on performance.

3. Organizations will adopt a "Continuous Evolution" model

Continuous Evolution will leverage new channels of delivery for end-users and businesses. The way of doing business is changing, and a need to evolve to the next level is more evident than ever before. Being challenged by mobile is the story of the past, and now is the time for businesses to hit the multiplier by leveraging their existing mobile capabilities. Companies must learn to take the best of their mobile investments, then accelerate them through their backlog with DevOps practices, and deliver game changing results via IoT. Effectively, Continuous Evolution enables a business to ensure the delivery of quality, scale, and performance throughout its products and services; so businesses impress their customers with amazing experiences.

Though the year ahead brings many unknowns, users will continue to judge businesses by their performance. Those who embrace the changes ahead will rise to the top, while the others will simply be left behind.

Todd DeCapua is Chief Technology Evangelist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.