APMdigest's 2017 Application Performance Management Predictions is a forecast by the top minds in APM today. 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 2017. Part 5, the final installment, covers the business side of APM.

Start with 2017 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2017 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with 2017 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

Start with 2017 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

41. RISE OF THE CXO

Now more than ever companies are thinking about the digital customer experience. Customer experience is becoming a c-level job, we will begin seeing more CXOs.
Assaf Resnick
CEO, BigPanda

42. ROLE OF SYSADMIN NOT GOING AWAY

Contrary to popular belief, the role of sys admins isn't going away. Rather, the "title" and role of sys admins will evolve to where they need to understand the big picture of the organization and the IT department instead of their personal responsibilities.
Jason Hand
DevOps Evangelist, VictorOps

43. INCREASED INVESTMENT IN TOOLS

Quocirca research published in October 2016 shows that application downtime has over taken security as the top IT management concern. With around 15% of the average IT team's time spent on addressing the critical IT events that lead to this, efforts will be made to reduce the impact of such events and to fix problems faster. The IT teams that cope best do so due to improved visibility and co-ordination provide by effective operational intelligence. As IT complexity increases through more use of mixed on-premise and cloud platforms, investment in the supporting crisis analysis and management tools is set to increase.
Bob Tarzey
Analyst and Director, Quocirca

44. MAXIMIZING EXISTING TOOL INVESTMENTS

We're finding that large enterprises are fast recognizing that adding to that ever growing pile of IT management and point solutions is costly, impossible to watch over effectively and can't go on. Making more of data from existing sources and tool-sets through aggregation, correlation and presenting this back to the business in a service context will really take off next year."
Grant Glading
Sales & Marketing Director, Interlink Software

45. COST INHIBITS APM DEPLOYMENTS

In 2017 the largest inhibitor to wide scale APM deployments will continue to be cost. As applications become more componentized and the number of nodes increase, so too does the cost of managing these solutions. This will be a barrier to microservices for most, which will result in miniservices being the typical application pattern in the enterprise.
Jonah Kowall
VP of Market Development and Insights, AppDynamics

46. APM PRICING SHAKEUP

The world of code-level APM will undergo a radical pricing shakeup in 2017. With AWS and Google officially entering the APM market in 2016, both offering significantly lower cost options than existing vendors, expect APM vendors to lower pricing and face margin pressure. And while the functionality of the APM tools provided by IaaS is well below what 3rd parties can provide, the pricing and easy integration will make it a "no brainer" add-on.
Damian Roskill
CMO, AppNeta

47. OPEN SOURCE APM: NOT READY YET

In 2017 the open source community will continue to improve regarding APM and tracing, but the solutions will still not be easily consumable by most enterprise buyers.
Jonah Kowall
VP of Market Development and Insights, AppDynamics

48. NEW COMPETITION

APM in 2017 – We will see the leading APM suite providers continue to expand their product and service portfolios increasingly via combinations of organic development and external acquisition. As these companies become larger and more broad-based, new competitors will continue to arise to challenge them in a manner similar to how today’s leaders challenged the earlier generation APM players. Examples of these new competitors will include not only conventional start-ups, but also cloud-based companies that are increasingly building out their own monitoring capabilities such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
Cameron Haight
Research VP, IT Operations, Gartner

Gartner: Top Predictions for IT in 2017 and Beyond

49. MAKING APM ACCESSIBLE TO THE BUSINESS

According to reviewers on IT Central Station, it's clear that making APM data understandable to the LOB will be a major priority for 2017. IT Central Station community members are increasingly demanding that APM tools play a larger role in overall business needs and strategies. For example, an increasing number of APM tools are assigning monetary values to technical transactions and involved in all facets of a company. In 2017, the products that surface the business value of APM data will be the winners in the competitive APM market.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

Read Russell Rothstein's blog: New for 2016: APM Roundup from Real Users

50. BUSINESS VALUE IS KEY

For the last couple of years, a number of APM predictions have centered on APM effectiveness being measured on business impact. In 2017, this will become reality. No longer will the measure of a good APM solution be solely focused on MTTR reduction benefits. Enterprise IT decision makers will want to know how an APM solution helps to ensure that applications drive business outcomes of customer experience, loyalty and revenue.
John Rakowski
Director of Technology Strategy, AppDynamics

Finally, its not just about identifying application performance issues; its also about understanding business outcomes. So expect more analytics capabilities (native or integrated) in APM solutions. in 2017.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

Thanks to all the experts for their excellent predictions.

To all the readers, sponsors and contributors of APMdigest: Have a Happy Holiday Season and a Successful 2017 ...