Skip to main content

Modernize Your Software to Transform Your Enterprise

Aruna Ravichandran

We live in a time when applications reign supreme. More and more of our interactions with business are done digitally via an app. Your software is now the face of your business. But how does your current software reflect on your brand and reputation? Does it give you competitive edge against more nimble, newer challengers?

Recently, CA Technologies and Forrester conducted a survey to evaluate the impact of software modernization on a number of key business metrics. Forrester conducted in-depth interviews with 212 enterprise commercial firms globally. The findings were fascinating, and require us to rethink the way we develop, deploy, and refresh enterprise software.

Some of these findings include:

■ How fast application development cycle times are a key factor in business revenue and growth

■ How development cycle times strongly correlate with the level of modern software in IT

■ How modernizing enterprise software can provide a competitive advantage

■ How maintenance costs can be reduced from software modernization

Just mull this over: the faster-growing companies had application development cycles that were 29 percent shorter than those in slower growing companies.

With these benefits of software modernization, why haven't most enterprises adapted? Forrester mentioned two reasons: 1) most enterprises aren't in a position to adapt to market trends, and 2) often, enterprise IT has a mantra of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Legacy infrastructure and software that served the organization well in the past to obtain efficiencies and vertical integrations can now impede change today. And older ideals and IT stability won't help you compete again new market entrants that bring along new technology, new channels, and new offerings.

As Forrester states in its research findings: "Simply staying up to date is insufficient to remain modernized. Modernized software is software that allows the firm to quickly react to business needs and business opportunities as it tries to win, serve, and retain customers."

The study then points out that "while revenue and profitability are measures of past performance, agility positions a firm to better react to both market opportunities and threats."

What does all this have to do with APM? Remember that just launching applications isn't going to bring success. You have to monitor the performance of those applications. More importantly, understand the experience your end-users are having with those applications.

But if your development team and operation teams are working in silos, is software lifecycle really modern? Can you achieve the next level of customer satisfaction? A DevOps culture must come into play.

To truly modernize your software, you have to modernize the way your app development and operations teams work. In a DevOps world, you can incorporate real-user data from APM into the development lifecycle of applications to deliver quality apps that drive loyalty and revenue. Using a DevOps philosophy with the right tools and communication, you will be able to launch high quality apps, capture the exact KPIs to need to measure customer experience, and speed app delivery.

The application economy isn't just a trend. It is real. To survive, you have to modernize software to speed application development cycles, and implement application performance management across Dev and Ops to drive quality and delight customers.

Aruna Ravichandran is VP, Product & Solutions Marketing, DevOps, CA Technologies.

Hot Topics

The Latest

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

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.

Modernize Your Software to Transform Your Enterprise

Aruna Ravichandran

We live in a time when applications reign supreme. More and more of our interactions with business are done digitally via an app. Your software is now the face of your business. But how does your current software reflect on your brand and reputation? Does it give you competitive edge against more nimble, newer challengers?

Recently, CA Technologies and Forrester conducted a survey to evaluate the impact of software modernization on a number of key business metrics. Forrester conducted in-depth interviews with 212 enterprise commercial firms globally. The findings were fascinating, and require us to rethink the way we develop, deploy, and refresh enterprise software.

Some of these findings include:

■ How fast application development cycle times are a key factor in business revenue and growth

■ How development cycle times strongly correlate with the level of modern software in IT

■ How modernizing enterprise software can provide a competitive advantage

■ How maintenance costs can be reduced from software modernization

Just mull this over: the faster-growing companies had application development cycles that were 29 percent shorter than those in slower growing companies.

With these benefits of software modernization, why haven't most enterprises adapted? Forrester mentioned two reasons: 1) most enterprises aren't in a position to adapt to market trends, and 2) often, enterprise IT has a mantra of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Legacy infrastructure and software that served the organization well in the past to obtain efficiencies and vertical integrations can now impede change today. And older ideals and IT stability won't help you compete again new market entrants that bring along new technology, new channels, and new offerings.

As Forrester states in its research findings: "Simply staying up to date is insufficient to remain modernized. Modernized software is software that allows the firm to quickly react to business needs and business opportunities as it tries to win, serve, and retain customers."

The study then points out that "while revenue and profitability are measures of past performance, agility positions a firm to better react to both market opportunities and threats."

What does all this have to do with APM? Remember that just launching applications isn't going to bring success. You have to monitor the performance of those applications. More importantly, understand the experience your end-users are having with those applications.

But if your development team and operation teams are working in silos, is software lifecycle really modern? Can you achieve the next level of customer satisfaction? A DevOps culture must come into play.

To truly modernize your software, you have to modernize the way your app development and operations teams work. In a DevOps world, you can incorporate real-user data from APM into the development lifecycle of applications to deliver quality apps that drive loyalty and revenue. Using a DevOps philosophy with the right tools and communication, you will be able to launch high quality apps, capture the exact KPIs to need to measure customer experience, and speed app delivery.

The application economy isn't just a trend. It is real. To survive, you have to modernize software to speed application development cycles, and implement application performance management across Dev and Ops to drive quality and delight customers.

Aruna Ravichandran is VP, Product & Solutions Marketing, DevOps, CA Technologies.

Hot Topics

The Latest

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

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.