Late in 2011 Quocirca conducted a research project across the USA and Europe to investigate what would be top of mind for CIOs and their management teams in 2012. We asked respondents to select their top 5 priorities from a list of 15 hot IT issues. These ranged from desktop upgrades, through various types of cloud deployment and network issues to improving the way applications are delivered.
Top of the list by a long chalk, selected by more than half the 500 respondents as a top 5 issue, was application performance management (APM). Perhaps this is not surprising; the other issues with high scores included private cloud deployment, data center virtualization, optimizing the application lifecycle, deploying new customer applications and business transaction management. All of these involve delivering more effective applications to the business, but APM is about ensuring that this goal is actually achieved.
As with any investment that a business makes, ensuring that it delivers as promised requires measurement. Ultimately IT is about delivery of the applications that enable the business, be they utilities such as email and document management systems or core applications that drive the business processes that differentiate one business from another. APM is about measuring the effectiveness of applications and therefore IT.
APM tools enable the proactive monitoring of the various factors that affect the overall performance of an application and ultimately the experience of its users. This includes the various application software layers (database, application server etc.), the network and user access environment. APM tools also provide the ability to see how performance changes through time. The output is actionable advice on how to maintain and improve application performance levels.
Consistently through the research it was CIOs (20% of the sample) who recognized the importance of these issues and expressed greatest concern about their organization’s ability to address them. That is not to say other IT managers were complacent, they were not far behind their bosses in most cases.
There was widespread recognition of the pressure to deliver better application performance, with 70% overall saying user demand will increase. CIOs were particularly worried with 80% saying that they did not have the application performance metrics well mapped to business goals and that monitoring needed to be more proactive. This latter point was consistent across the industries covered by the survey which were ecommerce, financial services, technology and a range of other commercial organizations.
The value of being able to better measure application performance and deliver measurable improvements efficiently goes beyond business and user satisfaction. One of the key aims, especially for CIOs, was to free up their staff to focus on more strategic goals rather than just fighting to keep the lights on. There was a clear willingness to invest in APM tools that delivered on promise rather than just seeking out those that cost the least.
IT managers recognize that being able to measure the performance of their applications is the only sure-fire ways of ensuring all IT investments are delivering as promised.
Related Links:
The report includes a self-evaluation tool to enable readers to measure where their organization’s maturity, with regard to APM, sits.
Quocirca will be presenting the report findings at two webinars on June 28, and at a seminar in the UK on July 5, links below:
Register here for the European webinar Thursday June 28, 2012
Register here for the US webinar Thursday June 28, 2012
Register here for the UK event “APM Performance Day” July 4, 2012
Bob Tarzey
Bob Tarzey has been an analyst with Quocirca since 2002. His main area of coverage is route to market for ITC vendors, but he also has an additional focus on IT security, network computing, systems management and managed services. Tarzey writes regular analytical columns for Computing, Computer Weekly, silicon.com and Computer Reseller News (CRN), and has written for The Times, Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph. Bob blogs for Computing, Info Security Advisor and IT-Director.com. He also provides general comment for the European IT and business press.
Bob has extensive knowledge of the IT industry. Prior to joining Quocirca, he spent 16 years working for US technology vendors including DEC (now HP), Sybase, Gupta, Merant (now Serena), eGain and webMethods (now Software AG).
The Latest
The OpenTelemetry End-User SIG surveyed more than 100 OpenTelemetry users to learn more about their observability journeys and what resources deliver the most value when establishing an observability practice ... Regardless of experience level, there's a clear need for more support and continued education ...
A silo is, by definition, an isolated component of an organization that doesn't interact with those around it in any meaningful way. This is the antithesis of collaboration, but its effects are even more insidious than the shutting down of effective conversation ...
New Relic's 2024 State of Observability for Industrials, Materials, and Manufacturing report outlines the adoption and business value of observability for the industrials, materials, and manufacturing industries ... Here are 8 key takeaways from the report ...
For mission-critical applications, it's often easy to justify an investment in a solution designed to ensure that the application is available no less than 99.99% of the time — easy because the cost to the organization of that app being offline would quickly surpass the cost of a high availability (HA) solution ... But not every application warrants the investment in an HA solution with redundant infrastructure spanning multiple data centers or cloud availability zones ...
The edge brings computing resources and data storage closer to end users, which explains the rapid boom in edge computing, but it also generates a huge amount of data ... 44% of organizations are investing in edge IT to create new customer experiences and improve engagement. To achieve those goals, edge services observability should be a centerpoint of that investment ...
The growing adoption of efficiency-boosting technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) helps counteract staffing shortages, rising labor costs, and talent gaps, while giving employees more time to focus on strategic projects. This trend is especially evident in the government contracting sector, where, according to Deltek's 2024 Clarity Report, 34% of GovCon leaders rank AI and ML in their top three technology investment priorities for 2024, above perennial focus areas like cybersecurity, data management and integration, business automation and cloud infrastructure ...
While IT leaders are preparing organizations for accelerated generative AI (GenAI) adoption, C-suite executives' confidence in their IT team's ability to deliver basic services is declining, according to a study conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value ...
The consequences of outages have become a pressing issue as the largest IT outage in history continues to rock the world with severe ramifications ... According to the Catchpoint Internet Resilience Report, these types of disruptions, internet outages in particular, can have severe financial and reputational impacts and enterprises should strongly consider their resilience ...
Everyday AI and digital employee experience (DEX) are projected to reach mainstream adoption in less than two years according to the Gartner, Inc. Hype Cycle for Digital Workplace Applications, 2024 ...
When an IT issue is not handled correctly, not only is innovation stifled, but stakeholder trust can also be impacted (such as when there's an IT outage or slowdowns in performance). When you add new technology investments and innovations into the mix, you have a recipe for disaster ...
