2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 7

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, AIOps, Observability, OpenTelemetry and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2023. Part 7 covers the user experience.

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 6

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT MOVES UP THE PRIORITY LIST IN 2023

Digital experience management (DEM) has become extremely important over the past year, as it has a direct impact on employee attraction and retention. The new world of widely distributed workforces and hybrid work has placed a greater burden on IT teams to make sure employees remain productive and satisfied in their work. We predict that DEM will continue to move up the priority list and garner more IT budget in the coming years as HR departments will be looking to the CIO and the IT organization to remain competitive in terms of offering a productive, satisfying end-user experience.
Dan O'Farrell
VP of Product Marketing, IGEL

THE DIGITAL EXPERIENCE-CENTRIC ORGANIZATION

Companies will become increasingly digital and experience-focused to thrive. The pandemic showed every company that its ability to survive was closely attached to the use of digital touchpoints to connect and service customers. Companies had to double-down on digital tools, improve their skills for managing digital experiences, and change operational processes and business models to adopt this digital-first approach. The pandemic-induced digital acceleration has only increased the pressure on every company to become a digital, experience-centric organization.
Will Payman
Senior Director, Strategy Customer Experience, Synoptek

CONVERGENCE OF DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT WITH HELPDESK

2023 will be the year of convergence — where the markets are colliding. Currently, ITSM and ITOM product line of business convergence is being witnessed. In the coming year, digital experience management blended with helpdesk functions like remote assistance will converge with service management.
Sree Subramaniam
Sr Dir, Inbound Product Mgmt, ITOM, ServiceNow

NEED FOR DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY

As many as 19 million Americans are excluded when digital experiences are not designed with disabled people in mind. 62% of those who use assistive technologies — like screen readers, tactile keyboards and more — say they frequently experience errors on a given day and 44% of those who use this tech experience errors that keep them from accomplishing a task on a daily basis. Many organizations haven't focused on ensuring their tech is available and accessible to everyone, making them behind on their digital accessibility journey. In 2023, we expect companies who are not prioritizing digital accessibility to lose users extensively in favor of companies who are ensuring their websites, applications, digital documents and more are readily available for all their users — including those with disabilities — and putting steam into testing for digital accessibility. For those organizations who haven't given the care and attention needed in this area, we're expecting to see them launching new efforts to incorporate digital accessibility into their brands.
Marcus Merrell
VP of Technology Strategy, Sauce Labs

END-USER TOLERANCE FOR ERRORS CONTINUES TO DECLINE

User experience affects our everyday lives — and brands' bottom lines. ccording to a recent data study, nearly a quarter of consumers (23%) say they encounter an error or experience issue that keeps them from accomplishing a task online at least once a day, which is highly detrimental to brand trust and customer loyalty. With early 1 in 5 (18%) users saying they won't wait any length of time for an error to be fixed, they'll simply go somewhere else, and as tech becomes evermore pervasive, we expect end user tolerance for errors to continue to decline—making this a top priority for IT leaders.
Marcus Merrell
VP of Technology Strategy, Sauce Labs

CONNECTING THE DOTS BETWEEN CRASH AND ERROR REPORTING

How users interact with our applications and their experience with them has always been a factor in development. However, over time, the emphasis placed on user experience over other factors has ebbed and flowed. That will change as users will continue to expect smoother and faster experiences with applications and will have less tolerance when their apps fail to comply. This means organizations will need greater visibility into not just crashes and the errors associated with them, but the performance issues that are as good as a crash, like slow screen loads and frozen apps. I predict we will begin to see more emphasis on teams trying to connect the dots between crash and error reporting and performance issues to get the full picture of the user experience with their application, and a true(r) readout of their apps' performance.
Michael Olechna
Product Marketing Manager, SmartBear

WEB3 MAKES USER EXPERIENCE EVEN MORE CRITICAL

Applications and systems will continue to be at the core of modern business in 2023, and the issues that end-users face, including slowed performance or downtime, will now have real consequences felt across the entire organization, especially as businesses ramp up digital transformation into Web3. To ensure Web3 transformation goes confidently, it's critical to have the right tooling for efficient and effective development, which in turn lowers spend and speeds up delivery times. Performance and load testing tools are designed to provide testers and developers with the ability to simplify and scale performance engineering across the organization, streamlining the transformation process.
Grigori Melnik
EVP & Chief Strategy Officer, Tricentis

CONVERGENCE OF TESTING AND APM

2023 will see the beginnings of a convergence of testing and APM. We're starting to see consolidation in both the market and in the personas we're all chasing. Testing companies are offering monitoring, and monitoring companies are offering testing. This is a natural outcome of the industry's desire to move toward true observability: deep understanding of real-world user behavior, synthetic user testing, passively watching for signals and doing real-time root cause analysis–all in service of perfecting the customer experience. The widespread and rapid adoption of OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing (and their implementation into many testing tools) is indicative of what's coming.
Ryan Vesely
VP of Global Solution Engineering, Sauce Labs

Go to: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 8, the final installment, covering NetOps and Network Performance Management.

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

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2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 7

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, AIOps, Observability, OpenTelemetry and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2023. Part 7 covers the user experience.

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 6

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT MOVES UP THE PRIORITY LIST IN 2023

Digital experience management (DEM) has become extremely important over the past year, as it has a direct impact on employee attraction and retention. The new world of widely distributed workforces and hybrid work has placed a greater burden on IT teams to make sure employees remain productive and satisfied in their work. We predict that DEM will continue to move up the priority list and garner more IT budget in the coming years as HR departments will be looking to the CIO and the IT organization to remain competitive in terms of offering a productive, satisfying end-user experience.
Dan O'Farrell
VP of Product Marketing, IGEL

THE DIGITAL EXPERIENCE-CENTRIC ORGANIZATION

Companies will become increasingly digital and experience-focused to thrive. The pandemic showed every company that its ability to survive was closely attached to the use of digital touchpoints to connect and service customers. Companies had to double-down on digital tools, improve their skills for managing digital experiences, and change operational processes and business models to adopt this digital-first approach. The pandemic-induced digital acceleration has only increased the pressure on every company to become a digital, experience-centric organization.
Will Payman
Senior Director, Strategy Customer Experience, Synoptek

CONVERGENCE OF DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT WITH HELPDESK

2023 will be the year of convergence — where the markets are colliding. Currently, ITSM and ITOM product line of business convergence is being witnessed. In the coming year, digital experience management blended with helpdesk functions like remote assistance will converge with service management.
Sree Subramaniam
Sr Dir, Inbound Product Mgmt, ITOM, ServiceNow

NEED FOR DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY

As many as 19 million Americans are excluded when digital experiences are not designed with disabled people in mind. 62% of those who use assistive technologies — like screen readers, tactile keyboards and more — say they frequently experience errors on a given day and 44% of those who use this tech experience errors that keep them from accomplishing a task on a daily basis. Many organizations haven't focused on ensuring their tech is available and accessible to everyone, making them behind on their digital accessibility journey. In 2023, we expect companies who are not prioritizing digital accessibility to lose users extensively in favor of companies who are ensuring their websites, applications, digital documents and more are readily available for all their users — including those with disabilities — and putting steam into testing for digital accessibility. For those organizations who haven't given the care and attention needed in this area, we're expecting to see them launching new efforts to incorporate digital accessibility into their brands.
Marcus Merrell
VP of Technology Strategy, Sauce Labs

END-USER TOLERANCE FOR ERRORS CONTINUES TO DECLINE

User experience affects our everyday lives — and brands' bottom lines. ccording to a recent data study, nearly a quarter of consumers (23%) say they encounter an error or experience issue that keeps them from accomplishing a task online at least once a day, which is highly detrimental to brand trust and customer loyalty. With early 1 in 5 (18%) users saying they won't wait any length of time for an error to be fixed, they'll simply go somewhere else, and as tech becomes evermore pervasive, we expect end user tolerance for errors to continue to decline—making this a top priority for IT leaders.
Marcus Merrell
VP of Technology Strategy, Sauce Labs

CONNECTING THE DOTS BETWEEN CRASH AND ERROR REPORTING

How users interact with our applications and their experience with them has always been a factor in development. However, over time, the emphasis placed on user experience over other factors has ebbed and flowed. That will change as users will continue to expect smoother and faster experiences with applications and will have less tolerance when their apps fail to comply. This means organizations will need greater visibility into not just crashes and the errors associated with them, but the performance issues that are as good as a crash, like slow screen loads and frozen apps. I predict we will begin to see more emphasis on teams trying to connect the dots between crash and error reporting and performance issues to get the full picture of the user experience with their application, and a true(r) readout of their apps' performance.
Michael Olechna
Product Marketing Manager, SmartBear

WEB3 MAKES USER EXPERIENCE EVEN MORE CRITICAL

Applications and systems will continue to be at the core of modern business in 2023, and the issues that end-users face, including slowed performance or downtime, will now have real consequences felt across the entire organization, especially as businesses ramp up digital transformation into Web3. To ensure Web3 transformation goes confidently, it's critical to have the right tooling for efficient and effective development, which in turn lowers spend and speeds up delivery times. Performance and load testing tools are designed to provide testers and developers with the ability to simplify and scale performance engineering across the organization, streamlining the transformation process.
Grigori Melnik
EVP & Chief Strategy Officer, Tricentis

CONVERGENCE OF TESTING AND APM

2023 will see the beginnings of a convergence of testing and APM. We're starting to see consolidation in both the market and in the personas we're all chasing. Testing companies are offering monitoring, and monitoring companies are offering testing. This is a natural outcome of the industry's desire to move toward true observability: deep understanding of real-world user behavior, synthetic user testing, passively watching for signals and doing real-time root cause analysis–all in service of perfecting the customer experience. The widespread and rapid adoption of OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing (and their implementation into many testing tools) is indicative of what's coming.
Ryan Vesely
VP of Global Solution Engineering, Sauce Labs

Go to: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 8, the final installment, covering NetOps and Network Performance Management.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Keys to Building a Partner Ecosystem That Scales

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Why ITOps Need Right-Sized AI, Not Bigger Models

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

The End of Reactive DevOps: AI-Driven Observability for Zero-Defect Digital Systems

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

5 Takeaways from the Observability Forecast for Media and Entertainment

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Why Moving Off the Cloud Is the Easy Part and What Comes Next Is Where Things Get Hard

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

Capacity Isn't a Guess: Observability-Driven Sizing for On-Prem Databases

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...