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

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 ...

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

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 ...