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The User is King

Seeing What Matters Through End User Experience Management
Trevor Matz

Growing mobile device diversity and management was high on the list of Gartner’s 10 top strategic technology trends for 2014. Gartner predicts that by 2018 BYOD users will double, or even triple, the size of the mobile workforce.

Gartner’s prediction describes the new reality of IT management: the User is King. End users want to work in the most efficient way — whether they are sitting at their desktops, accessing a virtualized application from their personal laptop, or using their mobile devices. In order to maximize user productivity, forward-looking enterprises need to embrace this reality and adopt a monitoring strategy that supports all of the application types, devices and delivery methods accessed by their users.

IT operations understand they are facing a potential conundrum. As Pete Goldin, APMdigest's Editor-in-Chief observed, "Progressive IT departments understand that success is about serving the business goals of the company, and, from an IT point of view, that revolves around the End User Experience." However, at the same time, the growth of virtualization, of third-party cloud applications, and of mobile devices have all diminished visibility into End Users' experiences.

To meet this challenge effectively, IT operations must shift from a data center-centric to a user-centric computing model, and undergo a similar shift in how they measure performance and productivity. Meeting service level agreements on corporate server and network performance is no longer enough.

The popularity of Application Performance Management (APM) has shined a light on only one sub-component of End User Experience Management (EUEM), obscuring the fact that EUEM is a separate, multi-dimensional solution. EUEM encompasses the three primary components that dynamically interact to impact how End Users experience IT services:

- Application performance

- Physical, virtual and mobile device performance

- User productivity

With EUEM, enterprises are able to directly correlate the impact of IT on user productivity as they can see exactly what all of their end users are experiencing. This ability to see from the end user's "point of view" is especially critical as IT is tasked with monitoring, managing, and troubleshooting performance issues across the entire enterprise application portfolio, all of its device types and all of the delivery methods accessed by their users.

Companies who successfully pivot their "point of view" will readily monitor, validate and manage user experience no matter the application, the device or the user in order to:

- Automate monitoring performance

- Enhance service levels

- Promote business agility

- Optimize end user productivity

"EUEM is more than just monitoring application response times from the user's perspective," says David Williams, VP of Strategy in the Office of the CTO at BMC. "It is about understanding how IT consumers work, and empowering them to work smarter and faster."

In today’s reality of proliferating virtualized and cloud services, mobile device diversity and BYOD, the need for enterprises to see as their users see is more urgent than ever.

Trevor Matz is President and CEO of Aternity Inc.

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Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013: Big Data, Cloud, Analytics and Mobile

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The User is King

Seeing What Matters Through End User Experience Management
Trevor Matz

Growing mobile device diversity and management was high on the list of Gartner’s 10 top strategic technology trends for 2014. Gartner predicts that by 2018 BYOD users will double, or even triple, the size of the mobile workforce.

Gartner’s prediction describes the new reality of IT management: the User is King. End users want to work in the most efficient way — whether they are sitting at their desktops, accessing a virtualized application from their personal laptop, or using their mobile devices. In order to maximize user productivity, forward-looking enterprises need to embrace this reality and adopt a monitoring strategy that supports all of the application types, devices and delivery methods accessed by their users.

IT operations understand they are facing a potential conundrum. As Pete Goldin, APMdigest's Editor-in-Chief observed, "Progressive IT departments understand that success is about serving the business goals of the company, and, from an IT point of view, that revolves around the End User Experience." However, at the same time, the growth of virtualization, of third-party cloud applications, and of mobile devices have all diminished visibility into End Users' experiences.

To meet this challenge effectively, IT operations must shift from a data center-centric to a user-centric computing model, and undergo a similar shift in how they measure performance and productivity. Meeting service level agreements on corporate server and network performance is no longer enough.

The popularity of Application Performance Management (APM) has shined a light on only one sub-component of End User Experience Management (EUEM), obscuring the fact that EUEM is a separate, multi-dimensional solution. EUEM encompasses the three primary components that dynamically interact to impact how End Users experience IT services:

- Application performance

- Physical, virtual and mobile device performance

- User productivity

With EUEM, enterprises are able to directly correlate the impact of IT on user productivity as they can see exactly what all of their end users are experiencing. This ability to see from the end user's "point of view" is especially critical as IT is tasked with monitoring, managing, and troubleshooting performance issues across the entire enterprise application portfolio, all of its device types and all of the delivery methods accessed by their users.

Companies who successfully pivot their "point of view" will readily monitor, validate and manage user experience no matter the application, the device or the user in order to:

- Automate monitoring performance

- Enhance service levels

- Promote business agility

- Optimize end user productivity

"EUEM is more than just monitoring application response times from the user's perspective," says David Williams, VP of Strategy in the Office of the CTO at BMC. "It is about understanding how IT consumers work, and empowering them to work smarter and faster."

In today’s reality of proliferating virtualized and cloud services, mobile device diversity and BYOD, the need for enterprises to see as their users see is more urgent than ever.

Trevor Matz is President and CEO of Aternity Inc.

Related Links:

Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013: Big Data, Cloud, Analytics and Mobile

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...