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

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AI Appreciation Day Feature: Businesses View AI Agents as Essential, Not Just Experimental

A new study by the IBM Institute for Business Value reveals that enterprises are expected to significantly scale AI-enabled workflows, many driven by agentic AI, relying on them for improved decision making and automation. The AI Projects to Profits study revealed that respondents expect AI-enabled workflows to grow from 3% today to 25% by the end of 2025. With 70% of surveyed executives indicating that agentic AI is important to their organization's future, the research suggests that many organizations are actively encouraging experimentation ...

AI Appreciation Day Feature: Agentic AI Poised to Handle 68% of Customer Service and Support Interactions by 2028

Respondents predict that agentic AI will play an increasingly prominent role in their interactions with technology vendors over the coming years and are positive about the benefits it will bring, according to The Race to an Agentic Future: How Agentic AI Will Transform Customer Experience, a report from Cisco ...

How to Stay Resilient as Tariffs Disrupt Cloud and AI Innovation

A new wave of tariffs, some exceeding 100%, is sending shockwaves across the technology industry. Enterprises are grappling with sudden, dramatic cost increases that threaten to disrupt carefully planned budgets, sourcing strategies, and deployment plans. For CIOs and CTOs, this isn't just an economic setback; it's a wake-up call. The era of predictable cloud pricing and stable global supply chains is over ...

Early Adopters Are Preparing Enterprise Networks for AI Success

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

High-Business Impact Outages Cost Financial Services and Insurance Sectors $2.2 Million Per Hour

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Conversational APM: How GenAI Is Transforming Observability

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud Backup as a Business Asset: Why Your Backup Strategy Needs to Evolve

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private Cloud Outlook 2025: A Definitive Cloud Reset

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

Two-Thirds of Organizations Significantly at Risk of Software Outage within Next Year

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

MongoDB's Market Woes Shed Light on Hard Truths About Vendor Lock-in

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

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

AI Appreciation Day Feature: Businesses View AI Agents as Essential, Not Just Experimental

A new study by the IBM Institute for Business Value reveals that enterprises are expected to significantly scale AI-enabled workflows, many driven by agentic AI, relying on them for improved decision making and automation. The AI Projects to Profits study revealed that respondents expect AI-enabled workflows to grow from 3% today to 25% by the end of 2025. With 70% of surveyed executives indicating that agentic AI is important to their organization's future, the research suggests that many organizations are actively encouraging experimentation ...

AI Appreciation Day Feature: Agentic AI Poised to Handle 68% of Customer Service and Support Interactions by 2028

Respondents predict that agentic AI will play an increasingly prominent role in their interactions with technology vendors over the coming years and are positive about the benefits it will bring, according to The Race to an Agentic Future: How Agentic AI Will Transform Customer Experience, a report from Cisco ...

How to Stay Resilient as Tariffs Disrupt Cloud and AI Innovation

A new wave of tariffs, some exceeding 100%, is sending shockwaves across the technology industry. Enterprises are grappling with sudden, dramatic cost increases that threaten to disrupt carefully planned budgets, sourcing strategies, and deployment plans. For CIOs and CTOs, this isn't just an economic setback; it's a wake-up call. The era of predictable cloud pricing and stable global supply chains is over ...

Early Adopters Are Preparing Enterprise Networks for AI Success

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

High-Business Impact Outages Cost Financial Services and Insurance Sectors $2.2 Million Per Hour

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Conversational APM: How GenAI Is Transforming Observability

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud Backup as a Business Asset: Why Your Backup Strategy Needs to Evolve

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private Cloud Outlook 2025: A Definitive Cloud Reset

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

Two-Thirds of Organizations Significantly at Risk of Software Outage within Next Year

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

MongoDB's Market Woes Shed Light on Hard Truths About Vendor Lock-in

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...