As part of APMdigest's 2020 predictions, industry experts offer predictions on how ITSM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2020.
Start with 2020 Application Performance Management Predictions
APM SUPPORTS ITIL 4
APM will play a key role in supporting the new ITIL 4 framework by enhancing its predictive modeling and proactive monitoring capabilities to assist IT Service Management (ITSM). The workflow and reporting will be dynamic enough to present intrinsic datasets to support the very different demands for both Development and Operations.
Larry Dragich
Technology Executive and Founder of the APM Strategies Group on LinkedIn
CUSTOMER-CENTRIC THINKING
In 2020, the accelerated adoption of a combination of advanced automation techniques (i.e., RPA, deep learning, natural language processing) will notably increase the throughput of multiple ITSM processes and functions, increasing the service quality of IT departments while decreasing costs. Value must be a core principle in the provision of service and will require customer-centric thinking.
Olivier Saucin
Global Solution Director, Applications, CTG
ACTIONABILITY
Businesses will make progress moving toward an autonomous digital enterprise through technology innovations in AIOps, edge computing, the convergence of IT service management and IT operations management, SecOps, and DevOps. Rather than focusing on monitoring and observability — which only tell you what failed and why — businesses need to look at "actionability." Actionability takes it an important step further by giving actionable insights to help remediate while also helping to predict what could fail. Implementing technology that gives actionable insights will be critical for businesses looking to move further in their automation journey.
Ram Chakravarti
CTO, BMC Software
AUTOMATED INCIDENT RESOLUTION
When it comes to ITSM, and its manifestation beyond IT of Enterprise Service Management, we're going to see increased adoption of AI-driven automation — moving beyond service request resolution to automated incident resolution. Analytics, in general and predictive analytics to be specific will be used increasingly to drive decision-making proactively.
Dr. Akhil Sahai
CPO, Symphony SummitAI
24-HOUR IT
With the arrival of the new decade, IT organizations will begin a more concerted push to offer all IT services 24x7 to meet the expectations of around-the-clock business operations. New focus will be given to automation that supports this "always open" IT concept, so that IT never stands in the way of business requirements — regardless of the hour.
Kevin J. Smith
SVP, Ivanti
IMPROVED INTEGRATION
Based on reviews of ITSM software and tools on IT Central Station, our community members want better integration capabilities with reduced costs from their ITSM software and tools. In 2020, ITSM vendors who design better integration capabilities into their software and tools, while keeping costs low, will be addressing real user pain points.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station
DEVOPS MEETS ITSM
As businesses struggle to keep pace with customer expectations, they will see the need to adopt DevOps practices in all parts of their business, including mission-critical applications like the contact center that have thus far remained siloed and out of scope for DevOps initiatives. The implementation of DevOps as a catalyst for CX innovation in the contact center will break down CX system silos and fuel momentum of the drive towards cloud contact centers.
Elizabeth Magill
Senior Director of Product Marketing, Cyara
INCIDENT MANAGEMENT VS ENGINEERING
As is already being observed in smaller organizations, in 2020, the subservience of incident management organizations to engineering organizations will spread to larger enterprises as well. Companies are increasingly automating ITIL and ITSM. Those professionals that are impacted will be redeployed to positions that create even greater business value.
Paul Porter
VP Sales Engineering, xMatters
ITSM ALIGNS WITH THE BUSINESS
By the end of 2020, IT service management (ITSM) teams will decrease their focus on traditional ITSM best practices and instead focus on business alignment strategies. This new alignment will center more on automation and the speed of delivery than typical service management methods to ensure that service management is as dynamic and agile as the business processes it serves.
Kevin J. Smith
SVP, Ivanti
ITOM CONVERGES WITH SECURITY
The convergence of security and ITOM is just beginning to happen, we should continue to see more of this convergence play out, but many companies have struggled to fill the gap between the two groups, while there are only a few companies showing promise here.
Thomas Hatch
CTO and Co-Founder, SaltStack
The Latest
A growing need for process automation as a result of the confluence of digital transformation initiatives with the remote/hybrid work policies brought on by the pandemic was uncovered by an independent survey of over 500 IT Operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) professionals commissioned by Transposit for its inaugural State of DevOps Automation Report ...
As the Covid-19 pandemic forces a global reset of how we gather and work, 60% of organizations are looking forward to increased spending in 2021 to deploy new technologies, according to the 14th annual State of the Network global study of enterprise networking and security challenges released by VIAVI Solutions ...
Complexity breaks correlation. Intelligence brings cohesion. This simple principle is what makes real-time asset intelligence a must-have for AIOps that is meant to diffuse complexity. To further create a context for the user, it is critical to understand service dependencies and correlate alerts across the stack to resolve incidents ...
We're all familiar with the process of QA within the software development cycle. Developers build a product and send it to QA engineers, who test and bless it before pushing it into the world. After release, a different team of SREs with their own toolset then monitor for issues and bugs. Now, a new level of customer expectations for speed and reliability have pushed businesses further toward delivering rapid product iterations and innovations to keep up with customer demands. This leaves little time to run the traditional development process ...
On Wednesday January 27, 2021, Microsoft Office 365 experienced an outage affected a number of its services with a prolonged outage affecting Exchange Online. Despite Microsoft indicating that it was just Exchange Online affected during this outage, some monitoring tools detected that Azure Active Directory and dependent services like SharePoint and OneDrive were also affected at the time. The outage information indicated a rollout and rollback but we wouldn't expect to see such a widescale outage and slowdown just affecting some of the schema unless everything had to be taken offline ...
Application availability depends on the availability of other elements in a system, for example, network, server, operating system and so on, which support the application. Concentrating solely on the availability of any one block will not produce optimum availability of the application for the end user ...
A hybrid work environment will persist after the pandemic recedes, with over 80% stating that they expect over a quarter of workers to remain remote, and over two-thirds desiring flexibility between on-premises and remote deployments according to the 2021 State of the WAN report released by Aryaka ...
As vaccinations rise and businesses plan for a post-covid future, more than 80% of knowledge workers in the US would like their long-term work environment to include some element of remote work ...
With so many of us working from home, IT leaders and executives are now more than ever interested in ensuring that the cloud services their team relies on are available. But instead of accessing popular business-critical applications such as Salesforce, G Suite, Office 365, Microsoft 365, and so on through the company's data center, employees now get these services directly from the Internet. Experience and productivity at each location vary by internet, ISP, gateway, proxy, etc. ...
Integration challenges continue to be a major roadblock for digital transformation initiatives, according to MuleSoft’s 2021 Connectivity Benchmark Report. As digital initiatives accelerate, integration has emerged as a critical factor in determining the success and speed of digital transformation across industries ...
