2021 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 6

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 2021. Part 6, the final installment in the series, covers ITSM.

Start with: 2021 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2021 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with: 2021 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

Start with: 2021 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

Start with: 2021 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5

FOCUS ON BUSINESS CONTINUITY

Business continuity and operational risk management interest takes precedence. It is not a question of "if," but rather "when" a disaster will strike. Responding to an incident in crisis mode without the benefit of planning, coordination, and testing can result in more downtime, higher recovery costs and times, a potential negative impact on brand and reputation, and business loss. In 2021, with the continued impact of COVID, we are likely to see even more interest from businesses, customers and investors regarding operational risk management, business continuity, and resiliency.
Anne Hardy
CISO, Talend

IMPROVED ITSM GUI AND DASHBOARDS

A common trend among IT Central Station ITSM reviews in 2020 was the lack of user-friendly interfaces. I therefore foresee vendors investing in the improvement of their GUIs and dashboards to enhance the user experience.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

SELF-SERVICE ITSM

AI/ML assisted self-service whether through chat bots, virtual assistants, or purpose-built portals will become the channel of choice for offering or receiving help and information. On the enterprise side, the stunning cost savings make it a no-brainer. But customers and employees choose it as well. No surprise here. People like getting what they want or need, when they want or need it, in the way they want to seek it.
Valerie O'Connell
Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

In reaction to the pandemic, more and more organizations will bring in internal IT teams, and utilize self-service models and SaaS platforms to reduce the dependencies on external resources.
Ali Siddiqui
CPO, BMC Software

In 2021, chatbots powered with AI will begin to eliminate the "front-line" support analyst as the human ITSM analyst will be replaced with self-service portals and intelligent chatbots. Analysts will shift their focus to major incidents (one-to-many), problem management, and change management. Over the next 3-5 years, human involvement for most ITIL processes will be decreased because of improved machine learning and automation capabilities. We will see the traditional IT analysts become much more focused on business objectives versus IT tasks.
Marcel Shaw
Principal Federal Solutions Architect, Ivanti

Self-Serve Analytics will ramp up in 2021. As the pandemic continues in 2021, companies will look to further reduce dependencies on IT functions with self-serve analytics. This will help them turn data into valuable, shareable assets more quickly. Remote workforces and online expansions are draining IT resources. Automated data preparation, curation, stewardship, quality controls, and machine learning tools will help to stem the tide of IT demands.
Krishna Tamman
CTO, Talend

ENTERPRISE SERVICE MANAGEMENT

The use of ITSM people, processes, and products in support of non-IT functions such as HR and facilities will become the norm. In a world where people will complain about the mustard at a free lunch, EMA research yields an absolutely unambiguous endorsement of ESM. It has universally positive outcomes. C-level keepers of the budget will fund these initiatives without hesitation.
Valerie O'Connell
Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

As organizations have adjusted to the realities of remote work and adapting to manual tasks which result in decreased productivity, businesses are scaling and deploying ITSM solutions, leading to an increase in operational complexity to support the diverse needs of users and IT environments. To help reduce this complexity, and deliver an amazing employee experience organizations will look to enterprise service management solutions as a way to adopt processes that drive digital transformation. With AI service management, businesses can leverage hyper-automation and operations automation to increase productivity across the organization. Enterprise service management is the natural evolution to ITSM and will help businesses evolve into autonomous digital enterprises.
Ali Siddiqui
CPO, BMC Software

CMDB/CMS GETS NEW LIFE

It's back to the future as old ideas get new life in new use cases. CMDB/CMS will get a brand refresh for its critical role in delivering the service modeling that AIOps requires. With digital transformation in overdrive, service modeling and effective change management are center stage. CMDB/CMS in combination with discovery and dependency mapping (DDM) will be re-imagined and shaped to new use cases that power service excellence and cost-cutting initiatives.
Valerie O'Connell
Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

IOT PERFORMANCE IMPROVES

Adoption of IoT use cases under the umbrella of "edge computing" will accelerate standardization of operating system and application components, greatly improving performance, monitoring, and reliability of IoT solutions.
Jered Floyd
Technology Strategist, Office of the CTO, Red Hat

Check back after the Holidays for 2 more predictions series, covering NPM and the Cloud.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Observability Is Becoming the Grid That Powers AI - and It Isn't Ready

For fifteen years, observability lived downstream of everything else. Code shipped, something broke, an engineer went to the dashboards. The job was forensic. The pillars we built, such as logs, metrics, and traces, were designed for that role: tell a human what just happened, fast enough that they can make it stop. That role has quietly ended ...

Hybrid IT Dominates Enterprise Architecture, with Colocation Anchoring Critical Workloads

Hybrid IT has become the standard operating model for enterprises — but that companies are still looking for the right hybrid IT mix, according to the 2026 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite. After years of cloud migration and hybrid adoption, organizations are shifting their focus from deciding whether to use cloud, colocation or on-premises infrastructure to determining which workloads belong in each environment ...

AI is Moving Fast, and Enterprise File Data Is Not Ready

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Move Fast Without the Usual Quality Penalty

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

When the Observability Bill Arrives for Agentic AI

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

AI is Breaking Enterprise Log Management

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

How Edge Intelligence Will Redefine Secure Connectivity

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

Production Inference Shifts Decisively to Private Cloud

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

Why DevOps Teams Build GenAI Tooling While Most Organizations Still Rely on Manual Monitoring

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Why Cloud Reliability Comes Down to People and How to Improve It

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

2021 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 6

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 2021. Part 6, the final installment in the series, covers ITSM.

Start with: 2021 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2021 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with: 2021 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

Start with: 2021 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

Start with: 2021 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5

FOCUS ON BUSINESS CONTINUITY

Business continuity and operational risk management interest takes precedence. It is not a question of "if," but rather "when" a disaster will strike. Responding to an incident in crisis mode without the benefit of planning, coordination, and testing can result in more downtime, higher recovery costs and times, a potential negative impact on brand and reputation, and business loss. In 2021, with the continued impact of COVID, we are likely to see even more interest from businesses, customers and investors regarding operational risk management, business continuity, and resiliency.
Anne Hardy
CISO, Talend

IMPROVED ITSM GUI AND DASHBOARDS

A common trend among IT Central Station ITSM reviews in 2020 was the lack of user-friendly interfaces. I therefore foresee vendors investing in the improvement of their GUIs and dashboards to enhance the user experience.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

SELF-SERVICE ITSM

AI/ML assisted self-service whether through chat bots, virtual assistants, or purpose-built portals will become the channel of choice for offering or receiving help and information. On the enterprise side, the stunning cost savings make it a no-brainer. But customers and employees choose it as well. No surprise here. People like getting what they want or need, when they want or need it, in the way they want to seek it.
Valerie O'Connell
Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

In reaction to the pandemic, more and more organizations will bring in internal IT teams, and utilize self-service models and SaaS platforms to reduce the dependencies on external resources.
Ali Siddiqui
CPO, BMC Software

In 2021, chatbots powered with AI will begin to eliminate the "front-line" support analyst as the human ITSM analyst will be replaced with self-service portals and intelligent chatbots. Analysts will shift their focus to major incidents (one-to-many), problem management, and change management. Over the next 3-5 years, human involvement for most ITIL processes will be decreased because of improved machine learning and automation capabilities. We will see the traditional IT analysts become much more focused on business objectives versus IT tasks.
Marcel Shaw
Principal Federal Solutions Architect, Ivanti

Self-Serve Analytics will ramp up in 2021. As the pandemic continues in 2021, companies will look to further reduce dependencies on IT functions with self-serve analytics. This will help them turn data into valuable, shareable assets more quickly. Remote workforces and online expansions are draining IT resources. Automated data preparation, curation, stewardship, quality controls, and machine learning tools will help to stem the tide of IT demands.
Krishna Tamman
CTO, Talend

ENTERPRISE SERVICE MANAGEMENT

The use of ITSM people, processes, and products in support of non-IT functions such as HR and facilities will become the norm. In a world where people will complain about the mustard at a free lunch, EMA research yields an absolutely unambiguous endorsement of ESM. It has universally positive outcomes. C-level keepers of the budget will fund these initiatives without hesitation.
Valerie O'Connell
Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

As organizations have adjusted to the realities of remote work and adapting to manual tasks which result in decreased productivity, businesses are scaling and deploying ITSM solutions, leading to an increase in operational complexity to support the diverse needs of users and IT environments. To help reduce this complexity, and deliver an amazing employee experience organizations will look to enterprise service management solutions as a way to adopt processes that drive digital transformation. With AI service management, businesses can leverage hyper-automation and operations automation to increase productivity across the organization. Enterprise service management is the natural evolution to ITSM and will help businesses evolve into autonomous digital enterprises.
Ali Siddiqui
CPO, BMC Software

CMDB/CMS GETS NEW LIFE

It's back to the future as old ideas get new life in new use cases. CMDB/CMS will get a brand refresh for its critical role in delivering the service modeling that AIOps requires. With digital transformation in overdrive, service modeling and effective change management are center stage. CMDB/CMS in combination with discovery and dependency mapping (DDM) will be re-imagined and shaped to new use cases that power service excellence and cost-cutting initiatives.
Valerie O'Connell
Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

IOT PERFORMANCE IMPROVES

Adoption of IoT use cases under the umbrella of "edge computing" will accelerate standardization of operating system and application components, greatly improving performance, monitoring, and reliability of IoT solutions.
Jered Floyd
Technology Strategist, Office of the CTO, Red Hat

Check back after the Holidays for 2 more predictions series, covering NPM and the Cloud.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Observability Is Becoming the Grid That Powers AI - and It Isn't Ready

For fifteen years, observability lived downstream of everything else. Code shipped, something broke, an engineer went to the dashboards. The job was forensic. The pillars we built, such as logs, metrics, and traces, were designed for that role: tell a human what just happened, fast enough that they can make it stop. That role has quietly ended ...

Hybrid IT Dominates Enterprise Architecture, with Colocation Anchoring Critical Workloads

Hybrid IT has become the standard operating model for enterprises — but that companies are still looking for the right hybrid IT mix, according to the 2026 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite. After years of cloud migration and hybrid adoption, organizations are shifting their focus from deciding whether to use cloud, colocation or on-premises infrastructure to determining which workloads belong in each environment ...

AI is Moving Fast, and Enterprise File Data Is Not Ready

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Move Fast Without the Usual Quality Penalty

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

When the Observability Bill Arrives for Agentic AI

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

AI is Breaking Enterprise Log Management

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

How Edge Intelligence Will Redefine Secure Connectivity

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

Production Inference Shifts Decisively to Private Cloud

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

Why DevOps Teams Build GenAI Tooling While Most Organizations Still Rely on Manual Monitoring

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Why Cloud Reliability Comes Down to People and How to Improve It

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...