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 2018. Part 4 covers the end user experience.

Start with 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

END USER EXPERIENCE

User experience (UX) monitoring becomes more prevalent, as organizations seek to better understand and highlight the last mile.
David Ishmael
Director of IT Operations Analytics, Trace3

The end user experience will be ever more important and more volatile because of the increased app complexity.
Peco Karayanev
Sr. Product Manager, Riverbed

In today's competitive market, customer experience is what differentiates one business from another. In 2018 understanding this experience will require a combination of monitoring and analytics across the digital ecosystem for insights into the customer journey, where users are dropping off and how performance affects the end-user. As business accelerate innovation to meet customer demands, monitoring tools will need to adapt to all forms of new technologies such as containers, cloud and IoT devices to fully attain the impact on customer loyalty and revenue.
Amy Feldman
Director, Product Marketing, CA Technologies

Looking into 2018, businesses will need to address the overall quality of their services as the competitive landscape evens out. This will result in a refocus on the monitoring of the customer experience and the need for extensive end-to-end testing, embedded within the delivery lifecycle.
Sven Hammar
Founder and CSO, Apica

Read Sven Hammar's Blog: What's Ahead for the Software Testing Industry in 2018?

Digital leaders will treat digital transformation as a partnership between business and IT, with a shared focus on meaningful outcomes and better experiences for customers and employees. Digital leaders will put people — customers, citizens, employees and partners — at the center of their transformation efforts. They will prioritize design thinking, a user-centric approach that shifts the focus from adding features to adding value. They will take advantage of platform tooling to involve users in solution design and invest in dedicated UX teams to deliver better experiences faster.
Chris Wiborg
VP of Product Marketing, Alfresco Software

I believe we will see more and more businesses investing in user experience management tools, as user analytics have proven to help improve productivity in so many ways. Some companies will use UEM to supplement APM, extending their KPIs and SLAs to encapsulate the human factor. Others will use UEM to assist with UX design, because they can easily identify features that are generating user confusion or are prone to failure. Still others will find that UEM tools can help ensure a smooth migration to new technology platforms - including SAP S/4HANA, cloud, or mobile.
Brian Berns
CEO, Knoa Software

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MONITORING

2018 will be the year in which End-User Experience Management begins to evolve at pace into Digital Experience Monitoring. No longer will the end user only be a human, but with the development of IoT, could be a machine or device. In this respect it's important that APM vendors ensure that they are not only able to monitor every user but every device and every sensor.
John Rakowski
Director of Technology Strategy, AppDynamics

RUM with JAVASCRIPT

RUM (Real-User Monitoring) with JavaScript is a very important technology, and will be essential in 2018 to track availability, functionality and responsiveness on the client-side. To complement this, native SDK for monitoring will improve exponentially in 2018, giving granular visibility to an increasingly complex IT environment.
Boris Krasniansky
Solution Architect, Correlsense

CUSTOMER COMMUNICATION

The role of IT Ops is continuing to be more closely tied to end user experience, which will change the nature of ITOps' relationships with other lines of business –– particularly customer service. As consumer expectations for a seamless digital experience become increasingly higher, the pressure is now on ITOps to address service disruptions quickly while keeping customer support in lock-step as they resolve problems. As we've seen with recent headline-making data breaches, this is particularly true in the case of security incidents. Real-time customer communication about IT and security issues is becoming table stakes, and ITOps will need to reconsider their business-wide communications strategy in order to meet these expectations.
Eric Sigler
Head of DevOps, PagerDuty

APM MOVES TOWARD MARKETING

In 2018 APM will start to link the user experience with technical metrics. Rather than focusing simply on the backend infrastructure, APM will need to understand the client side and link the user behavior with the technical behavior of the system. As a result, APM will move out of IT ops and will move towards marketing in 2018.
Antony Edwards
CTO, Testplant

NETOPS RESPONSIBLE FOR USER EXPERIENCE

Designers, marketers and developers have traditionally been the custodians of user experience — creating elaborate customer journeys, compelling audio and visual communication and intuitive transitions design to reduce complexity for the end user. But as applications and online services move to the cloud, network teams are increasingly being tasked with delivering on service level agreements and ensuring high quality user experience. We're now moving into the cloud-first world, and it's no longer acceptable to simply blame service degradation on a third party. Organizations that rely on public networks, DNS, CDN and DDoS mitigation providers for the delivery of apps and services have to take ownership of the user experience across unowned networks and services. Network teams will go beyond outage and status pages to offer internal and external client groups more detailed, self-service views into the performance of applications that they uniquely care about and the impact of network factors. In 2018 network engineers will start being measured against user experience-focused KPIs.
Alex Henthorn-Iwane
VP of Product Marketing, ThousandEyes

EMPLOYEE DIGITAL EXPERIENCE

I think we will see HR departments collaborating with IT to ensure that user analytics are mined to improve employee satisfaction and retention.
Brian Berns
CEO, Knoa Software

Employee digital experience becomes top priority. The balance between the external customer-facing digital world and internal employee-facing one has been slowing shifting in the past year as organizations realize they cannot be effective externally if they are not equally effective internally. This shift will accelerate in 2018. Evidence for this can be found in the many large organizations investing strongly in strategic digital workplace programs and in the creation and hiring of new roles such as director of digital workplace or chief employee experience officer.
Pedro Bados
CEO and Co-Founder, Nexthink

Read 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5, covering NoOps, Analytics, Machine Learning and AI.