2019 IT Predictions: Applications Remain Top of Mind, AIOps Meets Reality
January 23, 2019

Len Rosenthal
Virtual Instruments

Share this

This time last year, we predicted that IT managers were going to move away from the "hybrid data center" and finally realize the reality of the "hybrid application" – the concept that there are multiple components to a single application, living in different data centers and on different infrastructure types. And this year, we saw that prediction of an increased focus on applications come to pass, as organizations increasingly made buying and deployment decisions based on the needs of their applications. This also resulted in many organizations pulling workloads from the public cloud and redeploying them on-premises, due to an increased understanding the workload requirements and performance-focused SLAs.

It's become clear that not only do an organization's applications drive the business, but they actually are the business. As we move into 2019, the application will continue to be the focus of the conversation, but it will also evolve to be the central driver of IT, both from a workload placement perspective and from an operations management angle. IT departments are continuously trying to contextualize the information and insights provided by these applications, but this is much easier said than done. The problem is that many organizations lack real-time application-aware monitoring capabilities, leading to a limited understanding of how applications are interacting with the various infrastructure components. As a result, IT departments continue to "fly blind" when it comes to allocating their on-prem and cloud-based infrastructure resources to support the number one priority: customer-facing applications.

One technology hitting the headlines lately is AIOps, Gartner's category name for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning-assisted operations. If 2018 was the year of aggressively marketing these technologies, 2019 will be the year of cutting through the hype and revealing their true value when actually applied in a meaningful manner. This is crucial, as organizations are slowly but surely understanding that AIOps may not be the "easy button" they initially thought it was.

While some AIOps solutions have promised to relieve tool fatigue and make sense of the onslaught of data and alerts constantly berating IT practitioners, AIOps unfortunately isn't a "set it and forget it" solution – quite the opposite, in fact. Context and efficient integrations with existing systems are paramount to successful AIOps, and more and more organizations will soon discover that an algorithm combined with corollary alerts does not fix everything.

Much like the hype cycle we experienced with the cloud in the past decade, we're now starting to move past the buzzword phase and into the reality of meaningful AIOps initiatives. According to Gartner, we should expect to see more I&O leaders initiating AIOps deployments over the next two to five years, with most organizations looking to augment their IT service management and overall automation strategies.

Adoption of AIOps technologies didn't pan out the way IT vendors may have anticipated in 2018, and that tends to happen when the "solution" really isn't a solution at all, but rather an incremental feature or capability that's dressed up by buzzwords and marketing-speak. However, with organizations becoming more savvy about combining real-time monitoring with AIOps in 2019 and beyond, buying decisions will shift and the adoption of true application-aware AIOps will emerge in 2019 – resulting in more successful deployments of the technology.

Len Rosenthal is CMO at Virtual Instruments
Share this

The Latest

November 30, 2023

To help you stay on top of the ever-evolving tech scene, Automox IT experts shake the proverbial magic eight ball and share their predictions about tech trends in the coming year. From M&A frenzies to sustainable tech and automation, these forecasts paint an exciting picture of the future ...

November 29, 2023
The past few years have presented numerous challenges for businesses: a pandemic, rising interest rates, supply chain disruptions, and geopolitical conflict that sent shockwaves across the global economy. But change may finally be on the horizon. According to a recent report by Endava ... a majority of executives confirmed they are feeling optimistic about the current business climate, and as a result, are forecasting larger IT budgets, increased technology funding and rollout, and prioritized innovation in the coming year ...
November 28, 2023

Incident management processes are not keeping pace with the demands of modern operations teams, failing to meet the needs of SREs as well as platform and ops teams. Results from the State of DevOps Automation and AI Survey, commissioned by Transposit, point to an incident management paradox. Despite nearly 60% of ITOps and DevOps professionals reporting they have a defined incident management process that's fully documented in one place and over 70% saying they have a level of automation that meets their needs, teams are unable to quickly resolve incidents ...

November 27, 2023

Today, in the world of enterprise technology, the challenges posed by legacy Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) systems have long been a source of concern for IT departments. In many instances, this promising solution has become an organizational burden, hindering progress, depleting resources, and taking a psychological and operational toll on employees ...

November 22, 2023

Within retail organizations across the world, IT teams will be bracing themselves for a hectic holiday season ... While this is an exciting opportunity for retailers to boost sales, it also intensifies severe risk. Any application performance slipup will cause consumers to turn their back on brands, possibly forever. Online shoppers will be completely unforgiving to any retailer who doesn't deliver a seamless digital experience ...

November 21, 2023

Black Friday is a time when consumers can cash in on some of the biggest deals retailers offer all year long ... Nearly two-thirds of consumers utilize a retailer's web and mobile app for holiday shopping, raising the stakes for competitors to provide the best online experience to retain customer loyalty. Perforce's 2023 Black Friday survey sheds light on consumers' expectations this time of year and how developers can properly prepare their applications for increased online traffic ...

November 20, 2023

This holiday shopping season, the stakes for online retailers couldn't be higher ... Even an hour or two of downtime for a digital storefront during this critical period can cost millions in lost revenue and has the potential to damage brand credibility. Savvy retailers are increasingly investing in observability to help ensure a seamless, omnichannel customer experience. Just ahead of the holiday season, New Relic released its State of Observability for Retail report, which offers insight and analysis on the adoption and business value of observability for the global retail/consumer industry ...

November 16, 2023

As organizations struggle to find and retain the talent they need to manage complex cloud implementations, many are leaning toward hybrid cloud as a solution ... While it's true that using the cloud is not a "one size fits all" proposition, it is clear that both large and small companies prefer a hybrid cloud model ...

November 15, 2023

In the same way a city is a sum of its districts and neighborhoods, complex IT systems are made of many components that continually interact. Observability requires a comprehensive and connected view of all aspects of the system, including even some that don't directly relate to its technological innards ...

November 14, 2023

Multicasting in this context refers to the process of directing data streams to two or more destinations. This might look like sending the same telemetry data to both an on-premises storage system and a cloud-based observability platform concurrently. The two principal benefits of this strategy are cost savings and service redundancy ...