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Consumer Apps Beat Enterprise Apps on Performance

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Consumer software is seen as more reliable than enterprise software, and that consumer grade is the new standard for apps today, according to ScaleArc's annual survey of IT decision makers.

“It is clear that consumer grade is the new enterprise grade,” said Justin Barney, president and CEO of ScaleArc. “Even IT decision makers who build enterprise apps recognize that they, and the general public, have a better experience on their personal apps than their work apps. We’ve all lost patience with websites and apps that don’t offer optimal performance.”

Organizations responsible for building enterprise applications have also felt the additional pressures of meeting higher demands from its users.

“We’ve seen the shift in expectations in our customer base,” said Michael Atkins, IT operations for DealerSocket. “People are mobile all the time and always connected, so whether it’s a work app or a personal app, no one has the patience for it to be slow or – worse yet – offline. That experience has raised the bar for the service level we have to deliver with our enterprise SaaS offering.”

Setting a New Performance Standard

More than three-quarters (78 percent) of the IT decision makers participating in the survey agreed that consumer grade is the new standard for apps today.

The reasons cited for the shift were:

■ Better interfaces (54 percent)

■ Less likely to be sluggish (32 percent)

■ Less downtime (31 percent)

Survey respondents stated that performance requirements of consumer apps are higher because of their greater visibility (52 percent) and the need for them to make money (28 percent).

Almost one-third (31 percent) of the IT decision makers polled believe that companies developing consumer apps attract more talented people to design them, another reason behind their superior performance.

Consumer Apps vs. Enterprise Software

The vast majority (81 percent) of survey respondents said that consumer software is more reliable than enterprise software, with better software performance being a primary factor. More specifically, they stated that:

■ Consumer apps have faster performance (33 percent)

■ Consumer apps have zero downtime (26 percent)

■ Consumer apps have fewer crashes (26 percent)

Nearly 40 percent of the IT decision makers who responded to ScaleArc’s survey work for companies that deliver apps or services for other companies.

“However, even this group, responsible for SLAs in excess of 99.99 percent, overwhelmingly said they find consumer apps to be more reliable than enterprise apps,” Barney explained.

Most IT workers surveyed said they switch to consumer software products when enterprise software doesn’t work. Consumer products they turn to include Skype (37 percent), Dropbox (34 percent), Google Docs (34 percent) and Google Drive (34 percent).

Roughly 95 percent of the respondents said they would be negatively impacted if a website were slow or had downtime, with popular consumer sites easily beating out enterprise sites in terms of the impact of poor performance. Nearly 80 percent of the respondents would be impacted if Google were down, and 26 percent would be impacted if Facebook were down or slow. In contrast, only 18 percent of respondents noted they would be impacted if a business application such as web conferencing didn’t perform.

Survey Methodology: ScaleArc’s annual survey polled 528 IT decision makers who work for companies that primarily deliver apps or services for other businesses (39 percent) or for consumers (32 percent).

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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Consumer Apps Beat Enterprise Apps on Performance

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Consumer software is seen as more reliable than enterprise software, and that consumer grade is the new standard for apps today, according to ScaleArc's annual survey of IT decision makers.

“It is clear that consumer grade is the new enterprise grade,” said Justin Barney, president and CEO of ScaleArc. “Even IT decision makers who build enterprise apps recognize that they, and the general public, have a better experience on their personal apps than their work apps. We’ve all lost patience with websites and apps that don’t offer optimal performance.”

Organizations responsible for building enterprise applications have also felt the additional pressures of meeting higher demands from its users.

“We’ve seen the shift in expectations in our customer base,” said Michael Atkins, IT operations for DealerSocket. “People are mobile all the time and always connected, so whether it’s a work app or a personal app, no one has the patience for it to be slow or – worse yet – offline. That experience has raised the bar for the service level we have to deliver with our enterprise SaaS offering.”

Setting a New Performance Standard

More than three-quarters (78 percent) of the IT decision makers participating in the survey agreed that consumer grade is the new standard for apps today.

The reasons cited for the shift were:

■ Better interfaces (54 percent)

■ Less likely to be sluggish (32 percent)

■ Less downtime (31 percent)

Survey respondents stated that performance requirements of consumer apps are higher because of their greater visibility (52 percent) and the need for them to make money (28 percent).

Almost one-third (31 percent) of the IT decision makers polled believe that companies developing consumer apps attract more talented people to design them, another reason behind their superior performance.

Consumer Apps vs. Enterprise Software

The vast majority (81 percent) of survey respondents said that consumer software is more reliable than enterprise software, with better software performance being a primary factor. More specifically, they stated that:

■ Consumer apps have faster performance (33 percent)

■ Consumer apps have zero downtime (26 percent)

■ Consumer apps have fewer crashes (26 percent)

Nearly 40 percent of the IT decision makers who responded to ScaleArc’s survey work for companies that deliver apps or services for other companies.

“However, even this group, responsible for SLAs in excess of 99.99 percent, overwhelmingly said they find consumer apps to be more reliable than enterprise apps,” Barney explained.

Most IT workers surveyed said they switch to consumer software products when enterprise software doesn’t work. Consumer products they turn to include Skype (37 percent), Dropbox (34 percent), Google Docs (34 percent) and Google Drive (34 percent).

Roughly 95 percent of the respondents said they would be negatively impacted if a website were slow or had downtime, with popular consumer sites easily beating out enterprise sites in terms of the impact of poor performance. Nearly 80 percent of the respondents would be impacted if Google were down, and 26 percent would be impacted if Facebook were down or slow. In contrast, only 18 percent of respondents noted they would be impacted if a business application such as web conferencing didn’t perform.

Survey Methodology: ScaleArc’s annual survey polled 528 IT decision makers who work for companies that primarily deliver apps or services for other businesses (39 percent) or for consumers (32 percent).

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...