Compuware Corporation announced its top technology predictions for 2014:
Prediction 1: A new practice will emerge – AppOps
To accelerate application innovation through tighter IT-Business alignment, AppOps will surface. Digital business is upon us everywhere, and digital business leaders will continue to align IT for business advantage.
AppOps aligns development, production operations and business application owners in an effort to drive greater innovation to market faster with more application releases per month, per week, per day than ever before. The concepts of Agile development and DevOps are already giving way to the notion of Continuous Deployment. This push by business leaders will require IT to rethink and retool for a much more dynamic world.
Prediction 2: Mobile Applications as a Unique Phenomenon Will Disappear
Not only will there be more mobile applications and users than ever before, but they will be reabsorbed into the core IT and business processes of their companies. Mobile, native, web, and store as separate engagement channels will give way to "Omni-Channel" application development, monitoring and management. User experience, user behavior and cross-channel analytics will be vital business differentiators by the time we reach the 2014 holiday season.
Prediction 3: The Big Data Buzz Will Quiet as it Shifts From Hype to Reality
Big data must pass through the "trough of disillusionment" before it can emerge as a mainstream technology in 2015. In 2014, big data production shops will look for smarter ways to scale their fast growing, elastic environments. Their drive for faster, near real-time analytics will push early leaders beyond logs and free tools toward more proven approaches provided by specialized, new generation APM solutions. For those standing up big data for the first time, whether Hadoop, NoSQL or both, companies will look to simplify development to deployment with the newest methodologies and tooling.
New generation APM with specialized big data capabilities will emerge as a key enabler for successful big data projects.
Prediction 4: The Age Old Disciplines of ITIL and ITSM Will be Heavily Challenged in 2014
These disciplines, built on sound principles and methodologies, have guided IT leaders for over two decades. However, the pace of change, the business impact of applications, and the dynamic complexity of "the Internet of Things" are quickly making ITIL and ITSM less relevant. For many, they are anchors holding back the very innovation and change businesses require to survive and thrive. This business reality will drive IT to change, and in this disruption IT will look to dynamic, real-time, smart systems and tooling to build upon. As a result, the role of APM will expand to play a much larger role in the IT world of the future.
Prediction 5: New Generation APM Will Emerge as a Strategic IT Framework for Modern, Composite Applications
Composite applications will be used to speed innovation, eliminate guesswork and assure optimal end-user experience. Unlike old APM tools used to monitor production and alert to problems after they occur, this new generation of APM is used to eliminate the silos between production, test and development offering, for the first time, a proven proactive approach to application performance and availability management. New generation APM will redefine the category and emerge as the practical, proven successor to the failed mega-framework vendor vision of the last decade.
“2014 will bring transformative changes in IT - not just to meet the needs of today’s app-driven businesses, the explosion of mobile usage and the adoption of big data strategies - but also in the fundamental IT methodologies that guide businesses as they grow and compete,” said John Van Siclen, General Manager of Compuware’s APM business unit. “The role of new generation APM will expand to play a much larger role in the IT world of the future, and will emerge as a strategic framework to replace failed practices of the past decade.”
Steve Tack is VP of Product Management, Compuware's Application Performance Management (APM) Business Unit.