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

Len Rosenthal

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.

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In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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

Len Rosenthal

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.

Hot Topics

The Latest

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...

Despite the frustrations, every engineer we spoke with ultimately affirmed the value and power of OpenTelemetry. The "sucks" moments are often the flip side of its greatest strengths ... Part 2 of this blog covers the powerful advantages and breakthroughs — the "OTel Rocks" moments ...

OpenTelemetry (OTel) arrived with a grand promise: a unified, vendor-neutral standard for observability data (traces, metrics, logs) that would free engineers from vendor lock-in and provide deeper insights into complex systems ... No powerful technology comes without its challenges, and OpenTelemetry is no exception. The engineers we spoke with were frank about the friction points they've encountered ...

Enterprises are turning to AI-powered software platforms to make IT management more intelligent and ensure their systems and technology meet business needs for efficiency, lowers costs and innovation, according to new research from Information Services Group ...

The power of Kubernetes lies in its ability to orchestrate containerized applications with unparalleled efficiency. Yet, this power comes at a cost: the dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral nature of its architecture creates a monitoring challenge akin to tracking a constantly shifting, interconnected network of fleeting entities ... Due to the dynamic and complex nature of Kubernetes, monitoring poses a substantial challenge for DevOps and platform engineers. Here are the primary obstacles ...

The perception of IT has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. What was once viewed primarily as a cost center has transformed into a pivotal force driving business innovation and market leadership ... As someone who has witnessed and helped drive this evolution, it's become clear to me that the most successful organizations share a common thread: they've mastered the art of leveraging IT advancements to achieve measurable business outcomes ...

More than half (51%) of companies are already leveraging AI agents, according to the PagerDuty Agentic AI Survey. Agentic AI adoption is poised to accelerate faster than generative AI (GenAI) while reshaping automation and decision-making across industries ...

Image
Pagerduty