I’m a runner. Like many runners, I love numbers. I run six days per week, logging an average of 35 miles per week. My numbers give me insight that goes well beyond pure mileage. They tell me when to change my shoes, how much dark chocolate I can consume, where I am relative to my training goals and why my feet hurt.
What insights can we derive from the rapidly growing number of Application Performance Management (APM) vendors? Recent analyst reports highlight more than 25 companies. Only five years ago, I think there were less than 10.
Despite the less-than-favorable macroeconomic climate and flat IT budgets, the APM market is growing, capturing the attention of venture capitalists and established IT vendors. What’s driving so much interest in APM? Let’s go behind the numbers and take a look at some of the market forces that have come together to create an environment that is uniquely well-suited for APM solutions.
Unprecedented Demand
Challenge: The demands on IT to deliver more business services, faster and at a higher quality have never been greater. Additionally, the business wants these services available in more ways than previously thought possible across an ever-increasing number of devices.
Why APM?: Effective APM solutions continuously monitor all user transactions in real time throughout the application lifecycle (development, quality assurance and performance testing). This enables organizations to proactively identify, diagnose and resolve business service performance problems in both pre-production and production environments for improved service quality, reduced cycle times and faster time to market for new services.
Exceptional End-User Experience
Challenge: Attracting and retaining new customers is a top priority for IT and business leaders. Web users expect instantaneous response and do not accept delays. If performance is slow, they will move on to an alternative, translating into lost customers and revenue. Accordingly, delivering an exceptional end-user experience is paramount to achieving business goals.
Why APM?: APM solutions provide a 360-degree view of all user transactions, delivering a single source-of-truth on the health, availability, business impact and end-user experience of critical, revenue-generating services. By linking transactions to the dependent application, network and infrastructure components, IT organizations can quickly pinpoint problems, prioritize incidents by business impact and get firmly in control of the end-user experience.
Growing Complexity
Challenge: As business services become more critical to achieving business objectives, organizations are relying upon technologies such as virtualization, cloud, composite applications and third-party services to improve efficiency, reuse resources, accelerate time to market and manage costs. This has introduced a new level of complexity into an already complex IT environment that goes beyond human scale, making it even more difficult to meet the increased demand for high-quality services, deliver an exceptional end-user experience and drive business growth.
Why APM?: APM solutions significantly reduce complexity by monitoring transactions as they traverse physical, virtual, cloud and mainframe systems to identify, diagnose and resolve problems in the most dynamic and heterogeneous IT environments. Transactions are the key to reducing complexity and improving performance as they provide a consistent and reliable measure of business service health regardless of the IT environment.
APM Beyond the Numbers
Given this dynamic environment, what’s on tap for the APM market in 2012? While I’m a little late to make predictions, this is what I expect to see in the coming year:
- Less is more: Customers consistently tell us that they have too many IT management tools, which are further increasing complexity and taxing critical technical resources. Accordingly, APM solutions that unify application, infrastructure and network performance management will be well-positioned to address this important and growing need within enterprises.
- Tough sledding for niche vendors: Effective APM solutions are comprehensive and span a range of capabilities including end-user experience monitoring, business transaction management, deep-dive problem diagnosis, cloud monitoring, cross-enterprise management, synthetic transaction monitoring, application delivery analysis and application lifecycle management. Niche APM vendors that focus solely on one dimension will continue to struggle to meet the needs of enterprise-class organizations.
- Accountability is key: While more organizations are turning to SaaS-based solutions to source their critical business services, IT is still responsible for delivering high service levels and profitable business outcomes. To maintain visibility and control – and keep SaaS vendors accountable for SLAs – I expect to see even more organizations turn to cloud monitoring services for an outside-the-firewall view of the end-user experience.
- Delivery options will increase: Organizations want/need flexible options for how they deliver and consume APM (for example, on premise and SaaS). While a number of APM vendors provide these flexible sourcing options today, I expect to see even more this year.
- Business-centric APM rises to the top: Effective APM solutions are designed to help organizations achieve business objectives. As the boundaries between business and IT fade and more IT initiatives are funded by the business, APM solutions that have a business context as part of their DNA are better positioned to help the business attract/retain customers, grow revenue and improve efficiency.
My biggest prediction for 2012 is related to running. I predict that I will get a little faster this year, reducing my turtle-like 9-minute mile to a breakneck 8:30-minute mile. Oh, to dream big.
What are your predictions for 2012 (APM and non-APM)? Tweet me @mhsargeant.
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