The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 1

Almost every company is facing the challenge of digital transformation today. This means rethinking and retooling your company to compete and succeed in an increasingly digital world.

The digital transformation initiative within your organization has many aspects. It is about reaching your customers, and keeping them happy, in the digital economy. It is about supplying your team with the right technology to be faster, more efficient, and more innovative.

With all these goals to accomplish, where do you start? While digital transformation is not only about technology — and the right place to start may be transforming the company culture — the right tools can help. To find out what these right tools are, APMdigest asked experts from across the IT industry — from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors — for their opinions on the essential tools to support digital transformation. There is a wide range of tooling listed. The experts have many differing recommendations, but each one can be a valuable source of information. Each tip could possibly change your view, or make you think about tools — or ways to use those tools — that you have not thought about before.

The list of Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation will be posted in 7 parts over the next week. Part 1 starts with the digital experience.

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MONITORING AND MANAGEMENT

Many organizations incorrectly associate a digital transformation with the use of new technologies to solve old problems, only faster and cheaper. A real transformation means markedly changing an operation with new tech, not playing an old game better. To this end, the most important tool in the biztech arsenal will be Digital Experience Monitoring — a solution that moves beyond simplistic availability and response time monitoring to analyzing and optimizing every digital experience across every customer journey. To effectively support digital transformation initiatives, IT operations must strategically invest in Digital Experience Monitoring.
Pete Waterhouse
Advisor, Product Marketing, CA Technologies

The basis of digital transformation is the digital business service, made possible by digital technologies. Value as perceived by the customer is increasingly dependent on the digital aspects of a customer's journey, which is making the digital user experience critical to remaining competitive. So, the most important tool needed to support digital transformation is one that can monitor every aspect of digital business service performance. This includes the ability to measure critical quality touch points associated with the user experience and correlate them in real time to all components of digital business services — inclusive of business transactions, applications and the supporting infrastructure — regardless of the technology, supplier or deployment model.
John Worthington
Director Product Marketing, eG Innovations

Digital transformation is being driven by a massive influx in applications to offer new services, align customer experiences, and drive better partner relationships. But ensuring that these same apps hit their mark is a huge, concerning area for most companies. Although some products monitor the end user experience of web and mobile apps, companies need to do so for a broader portfolio of apps driving digital transformation — SaaS based, cloud based, running on virtual environments, or traditional client-server. Both in the development and production environments, companies need to leverage Digital Experience Management solutions to drive both business benefits and differentiated value.
Erik Hille
Product Marketing Director, SteelCentral at Riverbed

Digital transformation touches every part of the organization and is both an inevitable and overwhelming undertaking. In order to support digital transformation, companies should make sure they are using Digital Experience Management (DEM) to ensure their most important asset, their employees, are productive and successful. As employees depend more and more on applications and underlying infrastructure to get their jobs done, DEM-empowered IT teams are able to proactively detect and automatically remediate experience issues, and engage with employee to improve their efficiency and satisfaction.
Vincent Bieri
Co-Founder and Chief Product Evangelist, Nexthink

APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT (APM)

With the convergence of technology finding its way from the corporate world to our personal devices and home appliances, meeting the expectations of a quality customer experience is a formidable challenge. You need a strong Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution consisting of three factions, Wire Data Analytics, Synthetic Transactions, and Agent Code Instrumentation, that will dynamically manage the end-user-experience. I see APM as "table stakes" on the digital transformation front because you can't improve what you don't measure.
Larry Dragich
Technology Executive and Founder of the APM Strategies Group on LinkedIn.

Read Larry Dragich's New Blog: Digital Transformation Needs Intentionality

Real users who reviewed APM solutions in the IT Central Station community explain that APM tools help them with their digital transformation journey by ensuring their microservices perform well, by enabling them to scale AI initiatives, and by providing actionable data about customer experience.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

Download IT Central Station's review roundup report to learn how real users are utilizing APM solutions as part of their digital transformation.

Digital transformation should begin and end with the experience of the user or customer. If our technology solutions do not somehow enhance interactions with customers, they're missing the point. Digital transformation will benefit from tools that provide insight, feedback and a more predictive approach to improving the experience between a supplier and consumer. An APM (Application Performance Management) tool can provide organizations with the telemetry of information needed to develop a digital business that focuses on enhancing the customer experience.
Ryan Lynn
VP Emerging Technology | Office of the CTO, Trace3

Digital transformation is massively complex and consequential. Businesses that get it right will grow and thrive, while those that are slow to adopt face an uncertain future. But getting there isn't easy. Application teams need to orchestrate millions of lines of code across highly distributed, multicloud environments and manage relentless code releases that introduce constant change. And this complexity is growing as consumers demand flawless digital experiences. Businesses need an APM tool that simplifies digital performance management, silences the noise and surfaces insights from backwards-looking to real-time actionable answers about how application performance is driving customer experiences and business outcomes.
Marrisa Shumway
Sr. Director of Product Marketing, AppDynamics

An essential part of the digital transformation is fast paced and agile development. Modern companies who develop their own platforms execute anywhere from several up to several hundred deployments per day. (For example, developers at Airbnb ship more than 1,000 changes across thousands of microservices every day.) APM is crucial in these cases to understand the impact of every deployment automatically, and to align services accordingly.
Boris Krasniansky
Solution Architect, Correlsense

In the current volatile market scenario, businesses across the spectrum cannot afford to relax and count on their strategies in isolation. Digital Transformation is not only empowering consumers, but also creating digital disruption for businesses. Organizations need to manage this disruption effectively and keep exploring new user environments, service/product promotion patterns and emerging market scenarios. While this happens, the focus has to be on ensuring performance of the application that interacts with the customers and puts your service/product out there. It will not only help ensure the performance of your applications, but also offer the promised consumer experience.
Komal Lopez
Marketing Manager, Cigniti Technologies

END USER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT

User experience management software is essential for ensuring successful digital transformation. Digital transformation isn't simply a matter of making applications available on mobile devices or via the cloud; it requires an effective continuous process for empowering employees and increasing operational excellence. By employing user experience management software, you can find out exactly which applications, processes and workflows your employees are finding too slow, complicated and clunky, as well as which applications are the most widely used so that you can prioritize migration accordingly. This gives you a roadmap for digital transformation that focuses not just on technology, but on usability and workforce efficiency — and enables you to measure your upgrades for overall savings and efficiency impact through every step of the process.
Brian Berns
CEO, Knoa Software

Read The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 2, covering the network and the cloud.

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Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Move Fast Without the Usual Quality Penalty

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

When the Observability Bill Arrives for Agentic AI

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

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The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

How Edge Intelligence Will Redefine Secure Connectivity

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

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The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

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44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Why Cloud Reliability Comes Down to People and How to Improve It

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

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The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 1

Almost every company is facing the challenge of digital transformation today. This means rethinking and retooling your company to compete and succeed in an increasingly digital world.

The digital transformation initiative within your organization has many aspects. It is about reaching your customers, and keeping them happy, in the digital economy. It is about supplying your team with the right technology to be faster, more efficient, and more innovative.

With all these goals to accomplish, where do you start? While digital transformation is not only about technology — and the right place to start may be transforming the company culture — the right tools can help. To find out what these right tools are, APMdigest asked experts from across the IT industry — from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors — for their opinions on the essential tools to support digital transformation. There is a wide range of tooling listed. The experts have many differing recommendations, but each one can be a valuable source of information. Each tip could possibly change your view, or make you think about tools — or ways to use those tools — that you have not thought about before.

The list of Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation will be posted in 7 parts over the next week. Part 1 starts with the digital experience.

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE MONITORING AND MANAGEMENT

Many organizations incorrectly associate a digital transformation with the use of new technologies to solve old problems, only faster and cheaper. A real transformation means markedly changing an operation with new tech, not playing an old game better. To this end, the most important tool in the biztech arsenal will be Digital Experience Monitoring — a solution that moves beyond simplistic availability and response time monitoring to analyzing and optimizing every digital experience across every customer journey. To effectively support digital transformation initiatives, IT operations must strategically invest in Digital Experience Monitoring.
Pete Waterhouse
Advisor, Product Marketing, CA Technologies

The basis of digital transformation is the digital business service, made possible by digital technologies. Value as perceived by the customer is increasingly dependent on the digital aspects of a customer's journey, which is making the digital user experience critical to remaining competitive. So, the most important tool needed to support digital transformation is one that can monitor every aspect of digital business service performance. This includes the ability to measure critical quality touch points associated with the user experience and correlate them in real time to all components of digital business services — inclusive of business transactions, applications and the supporting infrastructure — regardless of the technology, supplier or deployment model.
John Worthington
Director Product Marketing, eG Innovations

Digital transformation is being driven by a massive influx in applications to offer new services, align customer experiences, and drive better partner relationships. But ensuring that these same apps hit their mark is a huge, concerning area for most companies. Although some products monitor the end user experience of web and mobile apps, companies need to do so for a broader portfolio of apps driving digital transformation — SaaS based, cloud based, running on virtual environments, or traditional client-server. Both in the development and production environments, companies need to leverage Digital Experience Management solutions to drive both business benefits and differentiated value.
Erik Hille
Product Marketing Director, SteelCentral at Riverbed

Digital transformation touches every part of the organization and is both an inevitable and overwhelming undertaking. In order to support digital transformation, companies should make sure they are using Digital Experience Management (DEM) to ensure their most important asset, their employees, are productive and successful. As employees depend more and more on applications and underlying infrastructure to get their jobs done, DEM-empowered IT teams are able to proactively detect and automatically remediate experience issues, and engage with employee to improve their efficiency and satisfaction.
Vincent Bieri
Co-Founder and Chief Product Evangelist, Nexthink

APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT (APM)

With the convergence of technology finding its way from the corporate world to our personal devices and home appliances, meeting the expectations of a quality customer experience is a formidable challenge. You need a strong Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution consisting of three factions, Wire Data Analytics, Synthetic Transactions, and Agent Code Instrumentation, that will dynamically manage the end-user-experience. I see APM as "table stakes" on the digital transformation front because you can't improve what you don't measure.
Larry Dragich
Technology Executive and Founder of the APM Strategies Group on LinkedIn.

Read Larry Dragich's New Blog: Digital Transformation Needs Intentionality

Real users who reviewed APM solutions in the IT Central Station community explain that APM tools help them with their digital transformation journey by ensuring their microservices perform well, by enabling them to scale AI initiatives, and by providing actionable data about customer experience.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

Download IT Central Station's review roundup report to learn how real users are utilizing APM solutions as part of their digital transformation.

Digital transformation should begin and end with the experience of the user or customer. If our technology solutions do not somehow enhance interactions with customers, they're missing the point. Digital transformation will benefit from tools that provide insight, feedback and a more predictive approach to improving the experience between a supplier and consumer. An APM (Application Performance Management) tool can provide organizations with the telemetry of information needed to develop a digital business that focuses on enhancing the customer experience.
Ryan Lynn
VP Emerging Technology | Office of the CTO, Trace3

Digital transformation is massively complex and consequential. Businesses that get it right will grow and thrive, while those that are slow to adopt face an uncertain future. But getting there isn't easy. Application teams need to orchestrate millions of lines of code across highly distributed, multicloud environments and manage relentless code releases that introduce constant change. And this complexity is growing as consumers demand flawless digital experiences. Businesses need an APM tool that simplifies digital performance management, silences the noise and surfaces insights from backwards-looking to real-time actionable answers about how application performance is driving customer experiences and business outcomes.
Marrisa Shumway
Sr. Director of Product Marketing, AppDynamics

An essential part of the digital transformation is fast paced and agile development. Modern companies who develop their own platforms execute anywhere from several up to several hundred deployments per day. (For example, developers at Airbnb ship more than 1,000 changes across thousands of microservices every day.) APM is crucial in these cases to understand the impact of every deployment automatically, and to align services accordingly.
Boris Krasniansky
Solution Architect, Correlsense

In the current volatile market scenario, businesses across the spectrum cannot afford to relax and count on their strategies in isolation. Digital Transformation is not only empowering consumers, but also creating digital disruption for businesses. Organizations need to manage this disruption effectively and keep exploring new user environments, service/product promotion patterns and emerging market scenarios. While this happens, the focus has to be on ensuring performance of the application that interacts with the customers and puts your service/product out there. It will not only help ensure the performance of your applications, but also offer the promised consumer experience.
Komal Lopez
Marketing Manager, Cigniti Technologies

END USER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT

User experience management software is essential for ensuring successful digital transformation. Digital transformation isn't simply a matter of making applications available on mobile devices or via the cloud; it requires an effective continuous process for empowering employees and increasing operational excellence. By employing user experience management software, you can find out exactly which applications, processes and workflows your employees are finding too slow, complicated and clunky, as well as which applications are the most widely used so that you can prioritize migration accordingly. This gives you a roadmap for digital transformation that focuses not just on technology, but on usability and workforce efficiency — and enables you to measure your upgrades for overall savings and efficiency impact through every step of the process.
Brian Berns
CEO, Knoa Software

Read The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 2, covering the network and the cloud.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is Moving Fast, and Enterprise File Data Is Not Ready

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Move Fast Without the Usual Quality Penalty

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

When the Observability Bill Arrives for Agentic AI

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

AI is Breaking Enterprise Log Management

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

How Edge Intelligence Will Redefine Secure Connectivity

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

Production Inference Shifts Decisively to Private Cloud

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

Why DevOps Teams Build GenAI Tooling While Most Organizations Still Rely on Manual Monitoring

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Why Cloud Reliability Comes Down to People and How to Improve It

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

Why IT Keeps Getting Handed an AI Training Problem It Can't Solve Alone

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 ...

Bringing IBM i Into the Modern Observability Stack: The Missing Piece of Enterprise AIOps

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 ...