2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 6

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, AIOps, Observability, OpenTelemetry, and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2022. Part 6 covers the user experience.

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5

TOTAL EXPERIENCE

The total experience (TX) trend is essentially about connecting the previously distinct disciplines of customer experience (CX), user experience (UX), employee experience (EX), and multi-experience (MX). The objective is to create a meaningful overall experience that satisfies and motivates employees and customers alike and boosts their loyalty.
Daniel Fallmann
Founder and CEO, Mindbreeze

EUEM EXPANDS ROLE

In 2022, we expect companies to invest and implement End-User Experience Management (EUEM) solutions in business areas beyond HR and Training. Line of Business leaders will use these tools to better understand the context of people, and how they are interacting with enterprise applications to drive desired business outcomes. As companies resume spending and investment in digital transformation projects, we expect EUEM solutions to be heavily involved, as tools to de-risk high profile projects, but also as a means of uncovering new areas of opportunity for improvement and change.
Josh Tambor
Customer Success Manager, Knoa Software

EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

CIOs are increasingly focused on providing amazing employee experiences with technology. This trend will continue and employee CSAT will become an important KPI for IT. ITSM systems will drive this transformation in 2022 and beyond by meeting employees where they are, on their turf, with self-service capabilities built into technologies and channels that employees are already using every day.
Manish Srivastava
VP, ITSM Product Management, ServiceNow

The 20s usher in the age of the employee. In the past decade, we've seen the consumerization of IT grip the enterprise, and in the next several years we'll see the emergence of the consumerization of enterprise applications to meet employee demand for intuitive, interactive apps to do their jobs well and better interact with others in a hybrid environment. Employees are now consumers driving a worker-led revolution to adopt user-friendly technologies, such as Apple products, Box, Zoom, Slack and more. To further support employee expectations, we'll also see intelligence capabilities increasingly embedded in apps and services — ultimately driving enhanced productivity, innovation and well-being across the board.
Derek Holt
GM of Agile and DevOps, Digital.ai

As part of the "measure what you got" stage, organizations will use analytics and data to see how well employees are using the technology platforms provided to them. Organizations will be able to see where employees are being held up, if their tech investments are proving productive, and where improvements can be made. As such, the user experience will become paramount for true digital adoption that will lead to greater return on organizations' technology investments. And while technology is indeed digital, the user is human. Those organizations that bridge the gap between the digital and the user will achieve greater ROI.
Rafael Sweary
President and Co-Founder, WalkMe

DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE

Open source and OpenTelemetry are driving the observability industry together, but at the end of the day, it's all about the developer experience. Companies building any kind of tooling for developers needs to remember that the developer is the key asset to focus on. You need to make them successful, give them a delightful experience and remove all friction. This way they can move fast and focus on what they need. Developers are one of the reasons that open source is growing so much. Developers want to be in a community where they can work with others, and they can collaborate in a larger group and be part of something a bit bigger. Especially during these times of COVID-19 where we're not as close as we used to be. So anything we can do to cultivate a better experience, whether for that individual developer or a group of developers, goes a long way. Every vendor and every customer should recognize the importance of the developer.
Frank Reno
Principal PM and Open Source Ambassador, Sumo Logic

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

After the last two years, even the laggards in the industry now understand the value of transforming their operations to digital first, whether its retail, transportation, energy, healthcare, or government. We'll continue to see an aggressive push towards creating a digital engagement strategy with customers, one which requires a 360-degree view of the customer and creates a seamless customer journey. Combine that with the concept of the Metaverse, and you'll start to see immersive customer engagement platforms emerging, which leverage AI, visual recognition, AR and other underlying technologies.
Savinay Berry
EVP, Product and Engineering, Vonage

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT

In 2022, business leaders will increasingly recognize that employee experience and customer experience are intertwined at a granular level — from the application, infrastructure, and even data layers. Businesses must have visibility across all of these layers and associated user experiences to drive their transformation agendas forward.
Mike Marks
Product Marketing, Aternity

EUEM AND DEM TOGETHER

We expect that companies will deploy End-User Experience Management (EUEM) and Digital Experience Management (DEM) and digital adoption solutions together. EUEM solutions provide context into where users can benefit from additional learning as well as measure the effectiveness of these initiatives.
Josh Tambor
Customer Success Manager, Knoa Software

RUNTIME CONTROL

In 2022, ensuring every application is available, functional and fast across every channel will require runtime control. As the adoption of cloud and containers continues to increase, applications rely on more dependencies. This increase in decomposition and decentralization makes it impossible to assure the digital experience without runtime control that can tune and calibrate services as needed.
Tobias Kunze
CEO and Co-Founder, Glasnostic

Go to: 2022 Remote Work Predictions

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Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 23: NetOps Labor Shortage

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Why FinOps Rewrote Its Mission and What It Signals for Technology Management

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Cold Data, Hot Problem: Why AI Is Rewriting Enterprise Storage Strategy

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

Explainability Is the New Battleground in AI-Powered Observability

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

Empowering the Human Side of the Autonomous IT Age

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

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AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

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The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...

2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 6

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, AIOps, Observability, OpenTelemetry, and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2022. Part 6 covers the user experience.

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5

TOTAL EXPERIENCE

The total experience (TX) trend is essentially about connecting the previously distinct disciplines of customer experience (CX), user experience (UX), employee experience (EX), and multi-experience (MX). The objective is to create a meaningful overall experience that satisfies and motivates employees and customers alike and boosts their loyalty.
Daniel Fallmann
Founder and CEO, Mindbreeze

EUEM EXPANDS ROLE

In 2022, we expect companies to invest and implement End-User Experience Management (EUEM) solutions in business areas beyond HR and Training. Line of Business leaders will use these tools to better understand the context of people, and how they are interacting with enterprise applications to drive desired business outcomes. As companies resume spending and investment in digital transformation projects, we expect EUEM solutions to be heavily involved, as tools to de-risk high profile projects, but also as a means of uncovering new areas of opportunity for improvement and change.
Josh Tambor
Customer Success Manager, Knoa Software

EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

CIOs are increasingly focused on providing amazing employee experiences with technology. This trend will continue and employee CSAT will become an important KPI for IT. ITSM systems will drive this transformation in 2022 and beyond by meeting employees where they are, on their turf, with self-service capabilities built into technologies and channels that employees are already using every day.
Manish Srivastava
VP, ITSM Product Management, ServiceNow

The 20s usher in the age of the employee. In the past decade, we've seen the consumerization of IT grip the enterprise, and in the next several years we'll see the emergence of the consumerization of enterprise applications to meet employee demand for intuitive, interactive apps to do their jobs well and better interact with others in a hybrid environment. Employees are now consumers driving a worker-led revolution to adopt user-friendly technologies, such as Apple products, Box, Zoom, Slack and more. To further support employee expectations, we'll also see intelligence capabilities increasingly embedded in apps and services — ultimately driving enhanced productivity, innovation and well-being across the board.
Derek Holt
GM of Agile and DevOps, Digital.ai

As part of the "measure what you got" stage, organizations will use analytics and data to see how well employees are using the technology platforms provided to them. Organizations will be able to see where employees are being held up, if their tech investments are proving productive, and where improvements can be made. As such, the user experience will become paramount for true digital adoption that will lead to greater return on organizations' technology investments. And while technology is indeed digital, the user is human. Those organizations that bridge the gap between the digital and the user will achieve greater ROI.
Rafael Sweary
President and Co-Founder, WalkMe

DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE

Open source and OpenTelemetry are driving the observability industry together, but at the end of the day, it's all about the developer experience. Companies building any kind of tooling for developers needs to remember that the developer is the key asset to focus on. You need to make them successful, give them a delightful experience and remove all friction. This way they can move fast and focus on what they need. Developers are one of the reasons that open source is growing so much. Developers want to be in a community where they can work with others, and they can collaborate in a larger group and be part of something a bit bigger. Especially during these times of COVID-19 where we're not as close as we used to be. So anything we can do to cultivate a better experience, whether for that individual developer or a group of developers, goes a long way. Every vendor and every customer should recognize the importance of the developer.
Frank Reno
Principal PM and Open Source Ambassador, Sumo Logic

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

After the last two years, even the laggards in the industry now understand the value of transforming their operations to digital first, whether its retail, transportation, energy, healthcare, or government. We'll continue to see an aggressive push towards creating a digital engagement strategy with customers, one which requires a 360-degree view of the customer and creates a seamless customer journey. Combine that with the concept of the Metaverse, and you'll start to see immersive customer engagement platforms emerging, which leverage AI, visual recognition, AR and other underlying technologies.
Savinay Berry
EVP, Product and Engineering, Vonage

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT

In 2022, business leaders will increasingly recognize that employee experience and customer experience are intertwined at a granular level — from the application, infrastructure, and even data layers. Businesses must have visibility across all of these layers and associated user experiences to drive their transformation agendas forward.
Mike Marks
Product Marketing, Aternity

EUEM AND DEM TOGETHER

We expect that companies will deploy End-User Experience Management (EUEM) and Digital Experience Management (DEM) and digital adoption solutions together. EUEM solutions provide context into where users can benefit from additional learning as well as measure the effectiveness of these initiatives.
Josh Tambor
Customer Success Manager, Knoa Software

RUNTIME CONTROL

In 2022, ensuring every application is available, functional and fast across every channel will require runtime control. As the adoption of cloud and containers continues to increase, applications rely on more dependencies. This increase in decomposition and decentralization makes it impossible to assure the digital experience without runtime control that can tune and calibrate services as needed.
Tobias Kunze
CEO and Co-Founder, Glasnostic

Go to: 2022 Remote Work Predictions

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 23: NetOps Labor Shortage

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Why FinOps Rewrote Its Mission and What It Signals for Technology Management

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Cold Data, Hot Problem: Why AI Is Rewriting Enterprise Storage Strategy

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

Explainability Is the New Battleground in AI-Powered Observability

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

Empowering the Human Side of the Autonomous IT Age

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI Scale Is Outpacing Infrastructure - and IT Leaders Are Running Out of Time

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

No Escalations ≠ No Work: Why Visibility in DevOps Matters More Now That AI Is Accelerating Everything

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...