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5 Predictions for the Enterprise Software Market in 2014

Jyoti Bansal

AppDynamics announced our 2014 predictions for the enterprise software market:

1. Enterprise IT will model Web companies, becoming more agile to expedite application deployment

To remain competitive and facilitate the increased pace of innovation in the enterprise, IT departments will retool to learn and adopt software development principles and processes from leading Web companies such as Google, Amazon and Netflix - which deliver innovation in days versus weeks - rather than from traditional vendors like IBM, Oracle and SAP.

This will allow enterprises to accelerate the delivery of applications to stay competitive in global markets, moving to weekly application release cycles instead of monthly or quarterly cycles and accepting the risks that come with a higher pace of change. Automated application testing and deployment will mean more repeatable processes, less manual effort and more predictable results.

2. "Bite-sized" applications will bypass IT teams

IT teams will be frequently bypassed as "bite-sized" applications that are refreshed often, delivered from the cloud and consumed across multiple device types, start to replace the traditional, rigid, "system-of-record" application suite.

3. Enterprises will require a different type of accountability across development and operations teams

Enterprises will measure their agility and commercial success based on shared key performance indicators (KPIs) such as productivity or revenue across teams, so that everyone is aligned and focused on what matters — the business.

Traditionally, enterprises have compensated development teams based on the delivery of new software features and the frequency at which they delivered them. Conversely, companies have measured operations teams based on ability to maintain application availability, health and uptime (e.g. 99.99 percent) rather than on the introduction of change and risk.

In 2014, enterprises will start to hold DevOps accountable to the same KPIs. Shared metrics will provide a new level of transparency and accountability, so that development and operations teams will know the exact impact their actions have on the business.

4. Enterprises will move to elastic production applications built for the cloud

In 2014, enterprise use of the public cloud will finally move from development and test applications to elastic production applications built for the cloud. Enterprises will begin using Amazon Web Services for elastic production applications, making them more accessible, more deployable and smarter in the cloud, using auto-scaling and auto-remediation capabilities.

These changes will allow enterprises to scale vertically and horizontally automatically and cost-efficiently, as demand for their business services fluctuates over time. This elasticity will also allow enterprises to avoid the high cost of over-provisioning resources ahead of time.

5. Enterprises will begin to focus on mobile-first applications and the end-user experience

IT will begin to shift focus from back-end services to mobile performance and the end-user experience. Enterprise IT will begin to measure customer success in using applications and evaluate the business implications of application performance.

Jyoti Bansal is Founder and CEO of AppDynamics.

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5 Predictions for the Enterprise Software Market in 2014

Jyoti Bansal

AppDynamics announced our 2014 predictions for the enterprise software market:

1. Enterprise IT will model Web companies, becoming more agile to expedite application deployment

To remain competitive and facilitate the increased pace of innovation in the enterprise, IT departments will retool to learn and adopt software development principles and processes from leading Web companies such as Google, Amazon and Netflix - which deliver innovation in days versus weeks - rather than from traditional vendors like IBM, Oracle and SAP.

This will allow enterprises to accelerate the delivery of applications to stay competitive in global markets, moving to weekly application release cycles instead of monthly or quarterly cycles and accepting the risks that come with a higher pace of change. Automated application testing and deployment will mean more repeatable processes, less manual effort and more predictable results.

2. "Bite-sized" applications will bypass IT teams

IT teams will be frequently bypassed as "bite-sized" applications that are refreshed often, delivered from the cloud and consumed across multiple device types, start to replace the traditional, rigid, "system-of-record" application suite.

3. Enterprises will require a different type of accountability across development and operations teams

Enterprises will measure their agility and commercial success based on shared key performance indicators (KPIs) such as productivity or revenue across teams, so that everyone is aligned and focused on what matters — the business.

Traditionally, enterprises have compensated development teams based on the delivery of new software features and the frequency at which they delivered them. Conversely, companies have measured operations teams based on ability to maintain application availability, health and uptime (e.g. 99.99 percent) rather than on the introduction of change and risk.

In 2014, enterprises will start to hold DevOps accountable to the same KPIs. Shared metrics will provide a new level of transparency and accountability, so that development and operations teams will know the exact impact their actions have on the business.

4. Enterprises will move to elastic production applications built for the cloud

In 2014, enterprise use of the public cloud will finally move from development and test applications to elastic production applications built for the cloud. Enterprises will begin using Amazon Web Services for elastic production applications, making them more accessible, more deployable and smarter in the cloud, using auto-scaling and auto-remediation capabilities.

These changes will allow enterprises to scale vertically and horizontally automatically and cost-efficiently, as demand for their business services fluctuates over time. This elasticity will also allow enterprises to avoid the high cost of over-provisioning resources ahead of time.

5. Enterprises will begin to focus on mobile-first applications and the end-user experience

IT will begin to shift focus from back-end services to mobile performance and the end-user experience. Enterprise IT will begin to measure customer success in using applications and evaluate the business implications of application performance.

Jyoti Bansal is Founder and CEO of AppDynamics.

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77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...

We just surveyed 300 frontend and mobile engineers across 16 countries, and the finding that keeps sticking with me isn't the one about AI. It's this: 74% of engineering teams rate themselves in the "middle" of the observability maturity scale. Not reactive, not strategic. Stuck in the middle. They have dashboards, they have tracing, they have alerts. And yet when something goes wrong, they still can't tell you why ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 25, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses  AI's impact on the Wide Area Network (WAN) ... 

Application performance monitoring (APM) dashboards are only as useful as what they are configured to measure. The default setup covers obvious failure modes such as downtime, error spikes, and latency breaches, but it does not cover everything. Some failures produce no alerts or anomalies. The dashboard stays green while users experience a broken product. Here are six signs that is happening ...

The race to deploy AI is largely over. Most enterprises have entered it. The question now is not whether artificial intelligence is running inside the organization. The question is whether anyone is genuinely responsible for what it does. That is not a technical question. It is a leadership one. And most organizations are not yet structured to answer it honestly ...

A new analysis of 250 real-world queries across common retail tasks, such as product pricing, availability, ratings, shipping and specifications, reveals systemic inefficiency at the heart of web-based AI agents. On average, 97.9% of the data retrieved by agents from live web pages is irrelevant to the query being answered. Specifically, the average page ingested ran nearly 9,000 characters, while the average answer was just 32 characters, resulting in a noise-to-signal ratio of 278:1. Price queries were the most extreme outlier, with noise rates approaching 99.5%. That's not a rounding error. That's a structural problem ...

The enterprises that will define the next decade are not the ones that deployed the most technology. They are the ones who understood what their technology was actually doing. That distinction is not a philosophical point. It is the central operational challenge facing every organization that has spent the last five years modernizing at speed ...

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...