Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2020. Part 4 covers End User Experience.
Start with 2020 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1
Start with 2020 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2
Start with 2020 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3
APM FOCUS: 360° DIGITAL USER EXPERIENCE
The advent of digital transformation, cloud-native services, microservices applications, DevOps, etc. have changed the way application performance management is implemented and used. There is a greater focus than ever before on the digital experience that end users perceive when they access IT applications. This has led to the proliferation of synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring technologies. While these solutions can provide proactive alerts to user experience issues, they do not provide all the reasons for why user experience may have degraded.
Furthermore, user experience is not only about how fast an application responds to a user request. Performance anomalies are bound to happen in the real world, and when they happen, how quickly are the issues detected and how accurately they are resolved is another measure of user experience and satisfaction. Pre-emptive and intelligent optimization and capacity planning can also ensure that user experience remains unaffected as user demand increases. All of these are also important components of any digital user experience management strategy.
The year 2020 will see IT organizations look to manage user experience holistically. They will seek solutions that embed code-level visibility to diagnose application issues, provide infrastructure-wide insights in the application delivery chain context to enable accurate and timely diagnosis and resolution of problems and include intelligent analytics for right-sizing and planning the infrastructure for optimal usage and performance.
Vinod Mohan
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, eG Innovations
EUEM DIVERGES FROM APM
EUEM will clearly separate from APM as APM has to focus on ITOps analytics. This will lead to a proliferation of new interesting products. Everything will have to be business outcome-focused. Marketing platforms will all hurry to acquire leaders in this space, but if they take too long, the reverse will happen.
Antony Edwards
COO, Eggplant
2020: THE YEAR OF USER EXPERIENCE
2020 will be the year of the indulgent user experience, and that doesn't bode well for the holdouts. Even as enterprise and industrial applications evolve, they're not yet consumer-friendly enough for daily users. Enterprise software companies who are still producing dull user experiences will find it harder to keep their users loyal, and will be even more vulnerable to disruption. When it comes to enterprise UX, the companies that will succeed are the visionaries that design software to make people's entire experience better.
Tim Tully
CTO, Splunk
It will be the year of user experience. It will become clear that for any business to compete in the age of "delete and replace" consumers, raised on smart phone app stores, open source, freemium model, and subscription services, user experience will be king and the result will be true consumer centric innovation.
Brian Dawson
DevOps Evangelist and Product Suite Marketing, CloudBees
As first impressions are made online, relationships between brands and consumers are now forged through applications and buying decisions are made through digital experiences. We are now living in the Era of the Digital Reflex where consumers engage with applications automatically and attach greater importance to digital experiences than face-to-face interactions with brands. In 2020, in order for marketers to adapt to these changing consumer behaviors, they will need to hyper focus on quality digital performance and the customer experience.
Angie Mistretta
CMO, AppDynamics
EVERYONE BECOMES ACCOUNTABLE FOR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
There's no doubt about it, the task of continuously delivering a superior customer experience (CX) is going to expand beyond IT Operations groups. If you touch any part of the infrastructure on which the CX depends, you will shoulder some of the load. The writing is already on the wall. In the just-released Incident Management in the Age of Customer-Centricity report, 91.7% of the more than 300 DevOps, ITOps and business leaders surveyed said delivering a superior customer experience is a priority in their role. In 2020, regardless of whether your business card says "Developer," "ITOps" or "SRE," your performance will be judged in part of the quality of the customer experience.
Paul Porter
VP Sales Engineering, xMatters
MOBILE IS THE NEW MEASURING STICK FOR USER EXPERIENCE
The notion of "mobile-first" has become a common part of the strategic vernacular in recent years as organizations increasingly prioritize the development and delivery of mobile apps alongside their web counterparts. But, for the most part, the web has remained the measuring stick for quality. That's poised to change in 2020. As we move deeper into the digital era, mobile will become the new measuring stick for quality. With a flawless web experience now seen as a given, mobile is fast becoming the lens through which organizations determine the extent to which they're delivering a high-quality digital experience to their customers. This will force development, engineering and product teams to partner more closely and ensure they're delivering a unified customer experience across both web and mobile platforms.
Joanna Schloss
Evangelist, Sauce Labs
MICROSERVICES DEGRADE THE USER EXPERIENCE
As more organizations use microservices to benefit from the development agility and shorter time to application deployment they offer, we will see a greater number of incidents across the enterprise over the next year. This shouldn't be surprising because as with anything, the greater the number of moving parts, the more opportunity for something to go wrong. Incidents that occur within and between containers may have a more narrow impact; however, throughout 2020 they will degrade the customer experience nonetheless.
Paul Porter
VP Sales Engineering, xMatters
THE "EXPERIENCE GENERATION" RISES
A whole generation has grown up thinking of everything — from movies to restaurants to cab rides — in terms of the experience they provide, as well as being able to rank, rate and offer feedback on the quality of these experiences. This "Experience Generation" has been joining the workforce in droves for years. However, when it comes to its experience of IT in the workplace (or, digital employee experience), its expectations remain rarely met, its feedback almost never sought, and they have by and large — as the most junior part of that workforce — been expected to accept this as the way things are, even when this has been at the expense of its own productivity and standards. In 2020, however, we will start to see a tipping point that is mostly qualitative: having got the first few years of their careers under their belts, this Experience Generation is starting to assume greater influence, importance and seniority in the workplace. One of the biggest impacts of this demographic shift will be on a growing intolerance for bad technological experiences at work, along with a will to influence them for the better. At best this will mean giving feedback here as they do in every other part of their lives. At worst simply voting with their feet. Now is the time for organizations to start getting ready for what this means.
Yassine Zaied
Chief Strategy Officer, Nexthink
INCREASED ADOPTION OF EUEM FOR EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
In 2020, we will continue to see increasing numbers of companies leveraging EUEM tools to ensure a positive user experience for their employees.
Brian Berns
CEO, Knoa Software
Go to 2020 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5, covering monitoring.
