2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5

Industry experts — from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2016. Part 5, the final installment, highlights the evolving IT environment, and offers a few predictions on the Application Performance Management market.

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

RELEASE QUALITY – THE NEW APPLICATION PERFORMANCE METRIC

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.
Todd DeCapua
Chief Technology Evangelist, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

2016 APM Prediction: Application Performance and Delivery Remain Top-of-Mind

API CHALLENGE DRIVES NEW APM, NPM AND ITOA TOOLS

Businesses will rely on APIs in their application stack more than ever, extending beyond internal business-related web services to infrastructure-related microservice APIs and external partner APIs. Development, QA and operations teams will face new challenges related to the integration of mission-critical services that are managed outside of their department, or even their organization. The concerns of these teams, when working with external service dependencies, are intertwined throughout the entire SDLC. Thus new tools will have to emerge that combine aspects of APM, NPM and ITOA relative to APIs, but more importantly, provide a common interface for easy cross-discipline collaboration between developers, testers and ops.
Neil Mansilla
VP of Developer Relations, Runscope

MICROSERVICES AND CONTAINERS REQUIRE REINVENTION OF APM

There will be increasing challenges for APM providers to be able to support the application (microservices), infrastructure (containers, SDx) and process changes (CI/CD) that are occurring in support of the needs of an increasingly digital business environment.
Cameron Haight
Research VP, IT Operations, Gartner

Perhaps the biggest disruption will be the continued adoption and evolution of microservices and containerization, which have really just started to become commodities. While microservices offer a lot of very compelling advantages, they also bring a new level of complexity to APM. The number of interacting components that make-up a system impacts all areas of troubleshooting, monitoring, logging, and debugging.
Sven Dummer
Senior Director of Product Marketing, Loggly

2016 will be the year where we see adoption of containers and microservices architectures truly skyrockets. It will be critical for APM solutions to provide additional and deeper metrics on containers performance. With modern containerized architectures gaining in terms of flexibility, speed and re-use, in a lot of cases the downside is a lot of additional complexity. APM solutions will need to focus on containers performance and how it maps to the overall application performance. There will be a greater need for higher visibility and additional levels of analytics for container-driven architectures.
Paola Moretto
Founder and CEO, Nouvola

APM has traditionally placed focus on user-facing services, such as web performance which took center stage in recent years. We are now in the rise of micro-service architectures, and in 2016, APM products will retool to focus on service-to-service performance analysis to better serve engineering teams.
Theo Schlossnagle
Founder and EVP, Products, Circonus

APM vendors will have to reinvent their products and business models to take advantage of and cope with Docker and containerization in general. Applications running on one JVM will get disaggregated into hundreds of micro-services, each of which talk to other micro-services on the same and different hosts. Transaction tracing between this "swarm" of micro-services will become essential. This is an enormous technical challenge that only leading edge APM vendors are equipped to meet. APM vendors will also have to revisit their pricing models as charging customers for each instance of each micro-service is simply not going to work.
Bernd Harzog
CEO, OpsDataStore

VENDOR OUTLOOK: CONSOLIDATION

As foreseen in previous years, the APM market continues to develop, both in terms of numbers of providers and inherent functionality, particularly with regard to end user visibility. However, a lack of fundamental differentiation between many of the providers means that consolidation is to be expected, either due to the collapse of (over geared) vendors, or via acquisition.
Larry Haig
Senior Consultant, Intechnica

APM Predictions 2016: Choosing an APM for Maximum Advantage

VENDOR OUTLOOK: THE BATTLE BETWEEN GROWTH PLAYERS AND STARTUPS

If we look at the market as falling into three categories: incumbent players, growth players, and startups, my prediction for 2016 is that the battle between growth players and startups will reach a feverish pitch. Growth players are driving toward going public, or perhaps having recently gone public, are driving overall customer growth. The younger startups in the space, in contrast, are seeking to flesh out differentiated products that will position them to take leadership positions away from growth players in 2017 and eventually from the incumbent players as well. But for 2016, the battle will be for mindshare between the growth players and startups.
Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx

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2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5

Industry experts — from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2016. Part 5, the final installment, highlights the evolving IT environment, and offers a few predictions on the Application Performance Management market.

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

Start with 2016 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

RELEASE QUALITY – THE NEW APPLICATION PERFORMANCE METRIC

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.
Todd DeCapua
Chief Technology Evangelist, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

2016 APM Prediction: Application Performance and Delivery Remain Top-of-Mind

API CHALLENGE DRIVES NEW APM, NPM AND ITOA TOOLS

Businesses will rely on APIs in their application stack more than ever, extending beyond internal business-related web services to infrastructure-related microservice APIs and external partner APIs. Development, QA and operations teams will face new challenges related to the integration of mission-critical services that are managed outside of their department, or even their organization. The concerns of these teams, when working with external service dependencies, are intertwined throughout the entire SDLC. Thus new tools will have to emerge that combine aspects of APM, NPM and ITOA relative to APIs, but more importantly, provide a common interface for easy cross-discipline collaboration between developers, testers and ops.
Neil Mansilla
VP of Developer Relations, Runscope

MICROSERVICES AND CONTAINERS REQUIRE REINVENTION OF APM

There will be increasing challenges for APM providers to be able to support the application (microservices), infrastructure (containers, SDx) and process changes (CI/CD) that are occurring in support of the needs of an increasingly digital business environment.
Cameron Haight
Research VP, IT Operations, Gartner

Perhaps the biggest disruption will be the continued adoption and evolution of microservices and containerization, which have really just started to become commodities. While microservices offer a lot of very compelling advantages, they also bring a new level of complexity to APM. The number of interacting components that make-up a system impacts all areas of troubleshooting, monitoring, logging, and debugging.
Sven Dummer
Senior Director of Product Marketing, Loggly

2016 will be the year where we see adoption of containers and microservices architectures truly skyrockets. It will be critical for APM solutions to provide additional and deeper metrics on containers performance. With modern containerized architectures gaining in terms of flexibility, speed and re-use, in a lot of cases the downside is a lot of additional complexity. APM solutions will need to focus on containers performance and how it maps to the overall application performance. There will be a greater need for higher visibility and additional levels of analytics for container-driven architectures.
Paola Moretto
Founder and CEO, Nouvola

APM has traditionally placed focus on user-facing services, such as web performance which took center stage in recent years. We are now in the rise of micro-service architectures, and in 2016, APM products will retool to focus on service-to-service performance analysis to better serve engineering teams.
Theo Schlossnagle
Founder and EVP, Products, Circonus

APM vendors will have to reinvent their products and business models to take advantage of and cope with Docker and containerization in general. Applications running on one JVM will get disaggregated into hundreds of micro-services, each of which talk to other micro-services on the same and different hosts. Transaction tracing between this "swarm" of micro-services will become essential. This is an enormous technical challenge that only leading edge APM vendors are equipped to meet. APM vendors will also have to revisit their pricing models as charging customers for each instance of each micro-service is simply not going to work.
Bernd Harzog
CEO, OpsDataStore

VENDOR OUTLOOK: CONSOLIDATION

As foreseen in previous years, the APM market continues to develop, both in terms of numbers of providers and inherent functionality, particularly with regard to end user visibility. However, a lack of fundamental differentiation between many of the providers means that consolidation is to be expected, either due to the collapse of (over geared) vendors, or via acquisition.
Larry Haig
Senior Consultant, Intechnica

APM Predictions 2016: Choosing an APM for Maximum Advantage

VENDOR OUTLOOK: THE BATTLE BETWEEN GROWTH PLAYERS AND STARTUPS

If we look at the market as falling into three categories: incumbent players, growth players, and startups, my prediction for 2016 is that the battle between growth players and startups will reach a feverish pitch. Growth players are driving toward going public, or perhaps having recently gone public, are driving overall customer growth. The younger startups in the space, in contrast, are seeking to flesh out differentiated products that will position them to take leadership positions away from growth players in 2017 and eventually from the incumbent players as well. But for 2016, the battle will be for mindshare between the growth players and startups.
Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Manufacturing Organizations Doubled AI Investment Yet Only 37% Fully Prepared to Operationalize AI

While 87% of manufacturing leaders and technical specialists report that ROI from their AIOps initiatives has met or exceeded expectations, only 37% say they are fully prepared to operationalize AI at scale, according to The Future of IT Operations in the AI Era, a report from Riverbed ...

Optimizing Decisions with Edge-First Cognitive Intelligence

Many organizations rely on cloud-first architectures to aggregate, analyze, and act on their operational data ... However, not all environments are conducive to cloud-first architectures ... There are limitations to cloud-first architectures that render them ineffective in mission-critical situations where responsiveness, cost control, and data sovereignty are non-negotiable; these limitations include ...

The New Perimeter Is the User: Why Identity Is the Real Network Edge

For years, cybersecurity was built around a simple assumption: protect the physical network and trust everything inside it. That model made sense when employees worked in offices, applications lived in data centers, and devices rarely left the building. Today's reality is fluid: people work from everywhere, applications run across multiple clouds, and AI-driven agents are beginning to act on behalf of users. But while the old perimeter dissolved, a new one quietly emerged ...

When AI Infrastructure Stops Behaving Like Infrastructure

For years, infrastructure teams have treated compute as a relatively stable input. Capacity was provisioned, costs were forecasted, and performance expectations were set based on the assumption that identical resources behaved identically. That mental model is starting to break down. AI infrastructure is no longer behaving like static cloud capacity. It is increasingly behaving like a market ...

Enterprise Resilience: Understanding the Shift from Static to Dynamic

Resilience can no longer be defined by how quickly an organization recovers from an incident or disruption. The effectiveness of any resilience strategy is dependent on its ability to anticipate change, operate under continuous stress, and adapt confidently amid uncertainty ...

Mobile Users Expect Perfection in 2026

Mobile users are less tolerant of app instability than ever before. According to a new report from Luciq, No Margin for Error: What Mobile Users Expect and What Mobile Leaders Must Deliver in 2026, even minor performance issues now result in immediate abandonment, lost purchases, and long-term brand impact ...

AI Confidence Is High. Readiness Is Not. What the Data Tells Us - and Why It Matters

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become the dominant force shaping enterprise data strategies. Boards expect progress. Executives expect returns. And data leaders are under pressure to prove that their organizations are "AI-ready" ...

Agentic AI, Realistic Expectations and the Future of IT Operations in 2026

Agentic AI is a major buzzword for 2026. Many tech companies are making bold promises about this technology, but many aren't grounded in reality, at least not yet. This coming year will likely be shaped by reality checks for IT teams, and progress will only come from a focus on strong foundations and disciplined execution ...

Trust, But Verify: Building Confidence in AI Through Human Oversight

AI systems are still prone to hallucinations and misjudgments ... To build the trust needed for adoption, AI must be paired with human-in-the-loop (HITL) oversight, or checkpoints where humans verify, guide, and decide what actions are taken. The balance between autonomy and accountability is what will allow AI to deliver on its promise without sacrificing human trust ...

Data Centers Plan to Reduce Reliance on Grid

More data center leaders are reducing their reliance on utility grids by investing in onsite power for rapidly scaling data centers, according to the Data Center Power Report from Bloom Energy ...