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Don't Let a Poorly Performing App Sink Your Business

Aruna Ravichandran

What happens when one of your smartphone apps runs a little slow? Maybe you tap the screen with a little extra thump in a physical effort to get things moving quicker, like hopelessly hitting the elevator call button extra times in an effort to get it to arrive faster. What if it crashes all together? Usually, you restart the app and hope for a better experience. If there's another failure, you might find another app (and business) that better supports your needs.

For IT organizations and businesses as a whole, there's tremendous pressure to deliver innovative mobile apps to market faster with a best-in-class user experience that boosts employee productivity or enhances customer engagement. The trickledown effect is this puts pressure on developers and architects to shorten application lifecycles in order to deliver these applications quicker.

With quicker development iterations and greater emphasis on the user experience, it's critical that both the development and operations teams have insight into the mobile application experience, particularly when it comes to native apps running on a device. As with the more "traditional" application lifecycle, Application Performance Management can play two roles to help speed mobile development and user experience:

- For developers, an APM tool can provide crash analytics information, device information such as memory usage, CPU usage, thread utilization and more that can be valuable feedback when fixing or improving an application.

- For the operations staff, APM can provide insight into calls being made to backend systems, network latency and more, all things that could be poorly impacting the overall user experience. After all, a shiny user interface is nothing if the backend systems that support it do not run efficiently.

Apps are developed, tested and thrown into an app store, but how do we know for sure they're working as planned? Unless a user complains, there's no way to know for sure. Today's mobile developers and operators need direct feedback about application performance, both at a code level and big picture view that takes in account how things out of a developers control (the network, etc.) impact performance.

It's critical to note that mobile doesn't live in a bubble alone. A vast number of mobile applications are extensions of existing Web and back office functions, so a mobile APM tool cannot live in a bubble. Such insight into mobile performance must be fed into a larger APM solution to provide IT with a big picture of how ALL of its applications and business services are performing. Without that, organizations are back stuck in silos of domain expertise with limited cross-functional view of how the business is performing as a whole.

As updates and enhancements are added at a quicker pace, information about how the app is performing across a variety of devices and network types is critical to delivering a great user experience. Chances are not good that users, particularly customers, are going to provide that kind of direct feedback. Instead, they'll take their business elsewhere. That's one experience you might not be able to fix.

Aruna Ravichandran is Vice President, Product and Solution Marketing, Application Performance Management and DevOps, CA Technologies.

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Don't Let a Poorly Performing App Sink Your Business

Aruna Ravichandran

What happens when one of your smartphone apps runs a little slow? Maybe you tap the screen with a little extra thump in a physical effort to get things moving quicker, like hopelessly hitting the elevator call button extra times in an effort to get it to arrive faster. What if it crashes all together? Usually, you restart the app and hope for a better experience. If there's another failure, you might find another app (and business) that better supports your needs.

For IT organizations and businesses as a whole, there's tremendous pressure to deliver innovative mobile apps to market faster with a best-in-class user experience that boosts employee productivity or enhances customer engagement. The trickledown effect is this puts pressure on developers and architects to shorten application lifecycles in order to deliver these applications quicker.

With quicker development iterations and greater emphasis on the user experience, it's critical that both the development and operations teams have insight into the mobile application experience, particularly when it comes to native apps running on a device. As with the more "traditional" application lifecycle, Application Performance Management can play two roles to help speed mobile development and user experience:

- For developers, an APM tool can provide crash analytics information, device information such as memory usage, CPU usage, thread utilization and more that can be valuable feedback when fixing or improving an application.

- For the operations staff, APM can provide insight into calls being made to backend systems, network latency and more, all things that could be poorly impacting the overall user experience. After all, a shiny user interface is nothing if the backend systems that support it do not run efficiently.

Apps are developed, tested and thrown into an app store, but how do we know for sure they're working as planned? Unless a user complains, there's no way to know for sure. Today's mobile developers and operators need direct feedback about application performance, both at a code level and big picture view that takes in account how things out of a developers control (the network, etc.) impact performance.

It's critical to note that mobile doesn't live in a bubble alone. A vast number of mobile applications are extensions of existing Web and back office functions, so a mobile APM tool cannot live in a bubble. Such insight into mobile performance must be fed into a larger APM solution to provide IT with a big picture of how ALL of its applications and business services are performing. Without that, organizations are back stuck in silos of domain expertise with limited cross-functional view of how the business is performing as a whole.

As updates and enhancements are added at a quicker pace, information about how the app is performing across a variety of devices and network types is critical to delivering a great user experience. Chances are not good that users, particularly customers, are going to provide that kind of direct feedback. Instead, they'll take their business elsewhere. That's one experience you might not be able to fix.

Aruna Ravichandran is Vice President, Product and Solution Marketing, Application Performance Management and DevOps, CA Technologies.

Hot Topics

The Latest

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...