Skip to main content

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.

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...

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.

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...