Gartner released the 2014 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring report, by Research VPs Jonah Kowall and Will Cappelli.

The report noted an increased importance in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery method for Application Performance Management (APM) capabilities: “Users are growing ever more convinced that there is little or no functional or performance loss when consuming APM through a SaaS delivery mode. In fact, security and operations issues can often be reduced or eliminated by consuming SaaS technologies. At the same time, the advantages of a zero-management platform and reduced maintenance and continuous feature evolution are becoming ever more salient in a ‘do more for less’ and DevOps-influenced IT environment.”

The report predicts, "By 2017 50% of application performance monitoring (APM) deployments that fulfill all five dimensions of functionality will be primarily SaaS, up from under 20% today."

The five dimensions of functionality include:

■ End-user experience monitoring (EUM)

■ Application topology discovery and visualization

■ User-defined transaction profiling

■ Application component deep dive

■ IT Operations Analytics (ITOA)

In the report, Gartner also noted key shifts in the functional emphasis of solutions in the changing APM market this year. “First, driven by the increasing significance of mobile application endpoints and dynamic Web technology, EUM is becoming even more important than it currently is to enterprises,” states the report.

"Second, the 2013 argument between an approach to application performance analytics that would couple ITOA functionality tightly to an APM portfolio and one that envisioned APM as one discipline that used a domain-independent ITOA platform, among others, will be decided in favor of the latter approach."

Evaluation criteria for "completeness of vision" included market understanding, marketing strategy, sales strategy, product strategy, business model, vertical and industry strategy, innovation, and geographic strategy. Criteria for "ability to execute" included product, overall viability, sales execution and pricing, market responsiveness and record, marketing execution, customer experience, and operations. Gartner positions each vendor on two axes — Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute — which lands them in a particular Quadrant. Those who demonstrate market understanding on both axes are placed in the top right "Leaders" quadrant. In this report, AppDynamics, Compuware (now Dynatrace) and New Relic, were placed in the Leaders quadrant. The other vendors featured in the report include AppNeta, BMC, CA Technologies, HP, IBM, ManageEngine, Microsoft, Riverbed Technology and SmartBear.

“The Gartner Magic Quadrant is a particularly credible metric because of the meticulous methodology they follow in researching the marketplace," says Jyoti Bansal, AppDynamics founder and CEO. "Gartner’s APM analysts interview hundreds of customers who are APM users. The Magic Quadrant report reflects the feedback from these actual users, as well as other evaluation criteria and the expertise of Gartner’s analysts, and is widely used and trusted by APM buyers.”

Several links to the report are available below.