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Preparing Your Mobile App for the Black Friday Digital Swarm

Derek Stevens

The Black Friday digital swarm is approaching. Are you prepared? Sure your infrastructure is ready to scale, you've issued a production code freeze, and you're actively monitoring your applications with Application Performance Management (APM), but many organizations are overlooking one major component that can have a direct impact on Black Friday revenue: the mobile app.  

Appbusters are the New Doorbusters

Mobile commerce is at an all-time high. In 2014, one in three online purchases came from a smartphone or tablet on Black Friday and at one point, mobile traffic surpassed 50% of all Internet traffic . From Black Friday to Cyber Monday, 70% of all traffic to Walmart.com was from mobile devices. This growth in mobile purchases is set to continue this year with an increasing number brands offering exclusive deals on mobile apps and in-store digital experiences. 
 
Despite the increasing importance of providing a great user experience for mobile apps, there are few companies who have mastered the mobile space. In fact, only 48% of organizations are using a mobile app analytics solution to understand user pain points and behavior. Without understanding how your users are interacting with your mobile app, it's impossible to put yourself in the shoes of your customers and answer key questions like: 

■ Where and when is the app used?

■ What are my users doing with our app?

■ Who is using our app?

■ Is our mobile app successful? 
 
But even if you have insight into user behavior, that alone isn't enough. Without a view into app crashes and performance, you won't understand why your users are behaving in certain ways. Take the following scenario as an example: it's Black Friday and you discover that 20% of your users are dropping off your mobile app at checkout. If you only have a view into user behavior, you won't know if users dropping off because the app is crashing on a specific device type or OS, if it's a certain carrier or network performance issue, if the transaction was taking too long to complete or if the users just decided to not to complete the checkout process. 
 
A mobile app analytics solution that provides you with insight into performance, crash, and usage analytics while providing end-to-end transaction visibility when combined with APM can give you the comprehensive view you need to effectively eliminate your mobile app blind spots.

Derek Stevens is Sr. Product Marketing Manager at CA Technologies.

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Preparing Your Mobile App for the Black Friday Digital Swarm

Derek Stevens

The Black Friday digital swarm is approaching. Are you prepared? Sure your infrastructure is ready to scale, you've issued a production code freeze, and you're actively monitoring your applications with Application Performance Management (APM), but many organizations are overlooking one major component that can have a direct impact on Black Friday revenue: the mobile app.  

Appbusters are the New Doorbusters

Mobile commerce is at an all-time high. In 2014, one in three online purchases came from a smartphone or tablet on Black Friday and at one point, mobile traffic surpassed 50% of all Internet traffic . From Black Friday to Cyber Monday, 70% of all traffic to Walmart.com was from mobile devices. This growth in mobile purchases is set to continue this year with an increasing number brands offering exclusive deals on mobile apps and in-store digital experiences. 
 
Despite the increasing importance of providing a great user experience for mobile apps, there are few companies who have mastered the mobile space. In fact, only 48% of organizations are using a mobile app analytics solution to understand user pain points and behavior. Without understanding how your users are interacting with your mobile app, it's impossible to put yourself in the shoes of your customers and answer key questions like: 

■ Where and when is the app used?

■ What are my users doing with our app?

■ Who is using our app?

■ Is our mobile app successful? 
 
But even if you have insight into user behavior, that alone isn't enough. Without a view into app crashes and performance, you won't understand why your users are behaving in certain ways. Take the following scenario as an example: it's Black Friday and you discover that 20% of your users are dropping off your mobile app at checkout. If you only have a view into user behavior, you won't know if users dropping off because the app is crashing on a specific device type or OS, if it's a certain carrier or network performance issue, if the transaction was taking too long to complete or if the users just decided to not to complete the checkout process. 
 
A mobile app analytics solution that provides you with insight into performance, crash, and usage analytics while providing end-to-end transaction visibility when combined with APM can give you the comprehensive view you need to effectively eliminate your mobile app blind spots.

Derek Stevens is Sr. Product Marketing Manager at CA Technologies.

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For years, cybersecurity was built around a simple assumption: protect the physical network and trust everything inside it. That model made sense when employees worked in offices, applications lived in data centers, and devices rarely left the building. Today's reality is fluid: people work from everywhere, applications run across multiple clouds, and AI-driven agents are beginning to act on behalf of users. But while the old perimeter dissolved, a new one quietly emerged ...

For years, infrastructure teams have treated compute as a relatively stable input. Capacity was provisioned, costs were forecasted, and performance expectations were set based on the assumption that identical resources behaved identically. That mental model is starting to break down. AI infrastructure is no longer behaving like static cloud capacity. It is increasingly behaving like a market ...

Resilience can no longer be defined by how quickly an organization recovers from an incident or disruption. The effectiveness of any resilience strategy is dependent on its ability to anticipate change, operate under continuous stress, and adapt confidently amid uncertainty ...

Mobile users are less tolerant of app instability than ever before. According to a new report from Luciq, No Margin for Error: What Mobile Users Expect and What Mobile Leaders Must Deliver in 2026, even minor performance issues now result in immediate abandonment, lost purchases, and long-term brand impact ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become the dominant force shaping enterprise data strategies. Boards expect progress. Executives expect returns. And data leaders are under pressure to prove that their organizations are "AI-ready" ...

Agentic AI is a major buzzword for 2026. Many tech companies are making bold promises about this technology, but many aren't grounded in reality, at least not yet. This coming year will likely be shaped by reality checks for IT teams, and progress will only come from a focus on strong foundations and disciplined execution ...

AI systems are still prone to hallucinations and misjudgments ... To build the trust needed for adoption, AI must be paired with human-in-the-loop (HITL) oversight, or checkpoints where humans verify, guide, and decide what actions are taken. The balance between autonomy and accountability is what will allow AI to deliver on its promise without sacrificing human trust ...

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