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The Business Cases for Application Performance Management

Gabriel Lowy

The business cases for Application Performance Management (APM) are customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. When applications run well, companies are better positioned to achieve return on investment (ROI) and risk management objectives.

Business processes can be streamlined or automated. They can be optimized around how to improve employee engagement and customer experience. Meeting or exceeding customer expectations – either through more responsive employees or excellent website interactions – is the key to strong customer relationships and loyalty.

Conversely, poor application performance negatively impacts the business. Employee productivity and morale sinks. They are unable to get their work done in a timely fashion or are hindered in their ability to provide high quality customer service. Trading partners become frustrated and look for alternatives. Most importantly, customer satisfaction plummets, undermining loyalty. The result is missed opportunities, competitive disadvantage and reputational damage.

IT teams that lack sufficient information about the root cause of application issues and poor user experience are plagued by inefficiency. Too much time is spent tracking down the source of performance problems rather than supporting the business.

Cutting Through Complexity to Deliver Consistent End User Experience

Companies are increasingly relying on applications to run all facets of their business. This has made it more important than ever for enterprises to monitor and manage the end user experience across all environments – physical, virtual, cloud, mobile and mainframe.

The greatest barrier to consistently high performance is complexity. Because modern applications have so many connection points between the end user and the data center, performance issues can arise anywhere along the application delivery chain. This becomes more pronounced as users increasingly engage with cloud-based applications that are controlled by service providers. And as more of these apps are accessed by mobile devices that the end user owns, complexity rises further.

The more business processes come to depend on multiple applications and the underlying infrastructure, the more susceptible they are to performance degradation. Failure at any point can turn a satisfied user into a frustrated one. If that user is an employee, productivity drops and so does their engagement. If the end user is a customer, the cost can be much higher in the form of eroded loyalty or lost business.

When application performance or availability issues do arise, end users expect a quick response time to problem resolution from IT, more frequently within minutes. And users will hold IT responsible for application performance – regardless of whether the application resides on premise or in the cloud. It’s no longer good enough for an application to work; it now needs to work to end user expectations.

IT can avoid the pressures of this guessing game by understanding their users and prioritizing the performance of their apps and websites accordingly. They can make sure that the apps that drive the business have the highest availability and reliability. This is the path to consistently meeting or exceeding user expectations.

Application Performance Drives Financial Metrics

As applications increasingly drive the business, APM is strategic and key to end-user engagement and loyalty – both within the enterprise and with customers. A clear linkage has emerged with how improvements in application performance and customer experiences are driving financial benefits. These include reduced costs, higher productivity and new revenue streams. But in order to realize the benefits of satisfied customers, application performance must been stellar – consistently.

CIOs can more closely align with end user objectives and corporate strategy by recognizing their role in employee engagement and customer satisfaction. The right tools can identify root cause of application issues and perform real-time triage to optimize user experience. A proactive approach improves their company’s employee responsiveness to build customer loyalty, increase revenues, and drive operational efficiency.

A more efficient IT team enables businesses to act on operational intelligence gained from a unified APM platform. Improvements have a domino effect across all functional areas of the organization – from sales and marketing to product development, manufacturing and supply chain management. They also help companies strengthen financial management, reduce risk and ensure adherence with governance, regulatory and compliance requirements.

To meet end user expectations, IT teams need to adapt a more holistic approach to performance management and decision analytics. Through best practices, they can help their companies leverage IT investments to discover, interpret and respond to the myriad events that impact their operations, security, compliance and competitiveness.

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The Business Cases for Application Performance Management

Gabriel Lowy

The business cases for Application Performance Management (APM) are customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. When applications run well, companies are better positioned to achieve return on investment (ROI) and risk management objectives.

Business processes can be streamlined or automated. They can be optimized around how to improve employee engagement and customer experience. Meeting or exceeding customer expectations – either through more responsive employees or excellent website interactions – is the key to strong customer relationships and loyalty.

Conversely, poor application performance negatively impacts the business. Employee productivity and morale sinks. They are unable to get their work done in a timely fashion or are hindered in their ability to provide high quality customer service. Trading partners become frustrated and look for alternatives. Most importantly, customer satisfaction plummets, undermining loyalty. The result is missed opportunities, competitive disadvantage and reputational damage.

IT teams that lack sufficient information about the root cause of application issues and poor user experience are plagued by inefficiency. Too much time is spent tracking down the source of performance problems rather than supporting the business.

Cutting Through Complexity to Deliver Consistent End User Experience

Companies are increasingly relying on applications to run all facets of their business. This has made it more important than ever for enterprises to monitor and manage the end user experience across all environments – physical, virtual, cloud, mobile and mainframe.

The greatest barrier to consistently high performance is complexity. Because modern applications have so many connection points between the end user and the data center, performance issues can arise anywhere along the application delivery chain. This becomes more pronounced as users increasingly engage with cloud-based applications that are controlled by service providers. And as more of these apps are accessed by mobile devices that the end user owns, complexity rises further.

The more business processes come to depend on multiple applications and the underlying infrastructure, the more susceptible they are to performance degradation. Failure at any point can turn a satisfied user into a frustrated one. If that user is an employee, productivity drops and so does their engagement. If the end user is a customer, the cost can be much higher in the form of eroded loyalty or lost business.

When application performance or availability issues do arise, end users expect a quick response time to problem resolution from IT, more frequently within minutes. And users will hold IT responsible for application performance – regardless of whether the application resides on premise or in the cloud. It’s no longer good enough for an application to work; it now needs to work to end user expectations.

IT can avoid the pressures of this guessing game by understanding their users and prioritizing the performance of their apps and websites accordingly. They can make sure that the apps that drive the business have the highest availability and reliability. This is the path to consistently meeting or exceeding user expectations.

Application Performance Drives Financial Metrics

As applications increasingly drive the business, APM is strategic and key to end-user engagement and loyalty – both within the enterprise and with customers. A clear linkage has emerged with how improvements in application performance and customer experiences are driving financial benefits. These include reduced costs, higher productivity and new revenue streams. But in order to realize the benefits of satisfied customers, application performance must been stellar – consistently.

CIOs can more closely align with end user objectives and corporate strategy by recognizing their role in employee engagement and customer satisfaction. The right tools can identify root cause of application issues and perform real-time triage to optimize user experience. A proactive approach improves their company’s employee responsiveness to build customer loyalty, increase revenues, and drive operational efficiency.

A more efficient IT team enables businesses to act on operational intelligence gained from a unified APM platform. Improvements have a domino effect across all functional areas of the organization – from sales and marketing to product development, manufacturing and supply chain management. They also help companies strengthen financial management, reduce risk and ensure adherence with governance, regulatory and compliance requirements.

To meet end user expectations, IT teams need to adapt a more holistic approach to performance management and decision analytics. Through best practices, they can help their companies leverage IT investments to discover, interpret and respond to the myriad events that impact their operations, security, compliance and competitiveness.

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Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...