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EMA Announces New Application and Business Services Practice Area

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a leading IT and data management research and consulting firm, will offer a new, cross-functional practice area. Focused on bridging the silos traditionally drawn between Application Management Performance (APM) and Business Service Management (BSM), the new practice will be jointly managed by VP of Research, Dennis Drogseth, and Research Director, Julie Craig.

In recent years, APM technologies and practices have grown beyond single domain, silo-based application awareness. At the same time, BSM has evolved to reflect critical areas of business alignment and cross-domain solution integration in support of service delivery and optimization. By breaking down what have become artificial boundaries, EMA is combining APM and BSM as a powerful continuum in its new Application and Business Services Practice.

“By uniting APM and BSM in a single practice area, EMA is offering what no other analyst firm can provide – in-depth insights into relevant Application and Business Service technologies, with a clear eye on organizational and process requirements,” said Drogseth. “This combined view also grants us a unique ability to focus on the many areas of innovation that cut across ‘neat’ market boundaries.”

Through Application and Business Services, EMA offers a uniquely versatile foundation for both IT buyers and vendor innovators to assess application and service management-related investments, directions, and future requirements.

The new practice area combines strong application-centric insights into the delivery of business services across the lifecycle with a broad set of cross-domain disciplines, including a focus on business impact, lifecycle service governance, automation, and analytics.

“Today’s companies rely on high performing applications for revenue, cost containment, customer retention, and employee satisfaction,” said Craig. “From this perspective, Application and Business Services breaks through an artificial barrier in separating application value from business value. Dennis and I look forward to broadening our respective messages while still retaining our own unique perspectives on business and technology.”

With this new approach, EMA can more effectively deliver insights into solutions and practices central to:

- Optimizing service delivery across Development and Operations

- Designing, delivering, and supporting applications

- Deploying and maintaining Operations-aware Service Desks

- Streamlining the linkages between configuration and change management with service assurance

- Unifying capacity planning and performance management into a single dynamic continuum

- Adapting application and business service strategies to cloud

- Developing business service planning

- Creating tighter links between IT services and the business goals of Line of Business executives and business planners.

Click here to see a list of topics covered by the Application and Business Service Practice area

Dennis Drogseth's Blog: EMA's Application and Business Services – a BSM Perspective

The Latest

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...

EMA Announces New Application and Business Services Practice Area

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a leading IT and data management research and consulting firm, will offer a new, cross-functional practice area. Focused on bridging the silos traditionally drawn between Application Management Performance (APM) and Business Service Management (BSM), the new practice will be jointly managed by VP of Research, Dennis Drogseth, and Research Director, Julie Craig.

In recent years, APM technologies and practices have grown beyond single domain, silo-based application awareness. At the same time, BSM has evolved to reflect critical areas of business alignment and cross-domain solution integration in support of service delivery and optimization. By breaking down what have become artificial boundaries, EMA is combining APM and BSM as a powerful continuum in its new Application and Business Services Practice.

“By uniting APM and BSM in a single practice area, EMA is offering what no other analyst firm can provide – in-depth insights into relevant Application and Business Service technologies, with a clear eye on organizational and process requirements,” said Drogseth. “This combined view also grants us a unique ability to focus on the many areas of innovation that cut across ‘neat’ market boundaries.”

Through Application and Business Services, EMA offers a uniquely versatile foundation for both IT buyers and vendor innovators to assess application and service management-related investments, directions, and future requirements.

The new practice area combines strong application-centric insights into the delivery of business services across the lifecycle with a broad set of cross-domain disciplines, including a focus on business impact, lifecycle service governance, automation, and analytics.

“Today’s companies rely on high performing applications for revenue, cost containment, customer retention, and employee satisfaction,” said Craig. “From this perspective, Application and Business Services breaks through an artificial barrier in separating application value from business value. Dennis and I look forward to broadening our respective messages while still retaining our own unique perspectives on business and technology.”

With this new approach, EMA can more effectively deliver insights into solutions and practices central to:

- Optimizing service delivery across Development and Operations

- Designing, delivering, and supporting applications

- Deploying and maintaining Operations-aware Service Desks

- Streamlining the linkages between configuration and change management with service assurance

- Unifying capacity planning and performance management into a single dynamic continuum

- Adapting application and business service strategies to cloud

- Developing business service planning

- Creating tighter links between IT services and the business goals of Line of Business executives and business planners.

Click here to see a list of topics covered by the Application and Business Service Practice area

Dennis Drogseth's Blog: EMA's Application and Business Services – a BSM Perspective

The Latest

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...