Industry experts from analyst and consulting firms and all the top vendors offer thoughtful, insightful, and sometimes controversial predictions on how Application Performance Management and related BSM and ITSM technologies will change and impact business in 2012.
1. APM For Everyone
We can expect APM products to become more appealing to a broader group of end-user organizations. Currently, many organizations who have the need for APM products are not deploying these solutions due to resources required for deploying and managing many traditional APM products. Traditionally, APM vendors have been largely focused on large enterprises. We expect that in 2012 many of them will make changes to deployment methods of their solutions, as well as pricing and packaging models, to make them more appealing to the other 99% of organizations that could benefit from APM technologies.
Bojan Simic
President and Principal Analyst, TRAC Research
SaaS solutions will reshape the BSM and APM market in 2012. New Software as Service solutions in the BSM and APM will reshape the way customers look at APM and BSM projects, allowing midstream customers to enjoy a full BSM management solution they could not afford to implement before.
Ariel Gordon
VP Products, Neebula Systems
2. Sprawl Becomes the #1 APM Challenge
The market has seen an explosion in the number of APM tools to monitor and manage end-user experience, application diagnostics, business transactions, cloud and virtualization performance, in addition to legacy performance monitoring tools for databases, networks, mainframes and other silos. In 2012, the #1 challenge that IT teams will face is dealing with loosely-integrated APM mega-suites and an abundance of disparate products causing “APM Overload” – too much data in multiple data stores, too many GUIs, and too many products to manage and support. Enterprises will seek out simplicity-of-use, ease-of-maintenance, and one solution that provides value across all IT constituents and the business.
Russell Rothstein
VP Marketing, OpTier
3. Breakout Year for Predictive Analytics
2012 will be a breakout year as large enterprises embrace predictive IT analytics as part of large scale application performance management (APM) solutions. In an effort to combat service degradations and outages, predictive IT analytics is enabling correlation of voluminous real-time data across silos encompassing IT infrastructure, business metrics, and application performance data from monitoring tools such as CA APM (Wily). The result is a literal “composite view” of performance that understands interdependencies between IT infrastructure and application performance to detect anomalies before they cascade into service degradation and IT outages. Business owners and senior IT officials will seek this composite view showing overall health of an application while also allowing administrators to detect anomalies and drill down to root cause and trouble shoot proactively.
Nicola Sanna
President and CEO, Netuitive
Using predictive analytics for performance monitoring can help organizations pro-actively manage emerging performance issues within their IT infrastructure. By identifying or predicting trends or patterns on how efficiently the services & applications are running, IT organizations can take action before failures occur. As a result businesses can reduce service disruptions, network congestion, prioritize urgent service desk requests, or have SMEs available before critical applications behave erratically.
Matthew Ellis
VP Tivoli Service Availability & Performance Management, IBM
4. APM Focuses on the End User
2012 will be the year when the ability to monitor and manage the experience of a user outside the firewall becomes more important than the ability to monitor and manage the performance of the applications inside the firewall. Organizations are going to want more and more integrated real time tools that can monitor and refine — automatically, and in real time — the end user experience. These tools won’t be disconnected from other APM tools, but more and more they will guide operators in what kinds of performance management adjustments must be made, both inside and outside the firewall.
Raj Sabhlok
President, ManageEngine
We are expecting to see many of the other elements that constitute APM to play an increasingly subsidiary role, and the center of APM will become the rich capture of end-user experience data, supplemented by a very powerful analytics capability that will draw data from whatever sources are available at the time to learn the causal patterns that will describe the application's behavior.
Will Cappelli
Gartner Research VP in Enterprise Management
The expansion of the definition of APM to focus on the end-user as the prime motivator for action not simply getting optimal performance from the infrastructure. Business operations managers care about infrastructure performance to the extent it impacts the end-user experience in accessing and using a service. That's what they want guaranteed, IT cares about infrastructure and that's where most of APM has traditionally been focused. The emphasis will continue to shift toward the consumer. The lines between APM and BPM will become even more blurred as a result of this change in focus.
Rich Ptak
Managing Partner at Ptak, Noel & Associates
Real user overtakes synthetic monitoring. With the increasing user expectations and growing move toward cloud/mobile computing, real user experience monitoring will become significantly more important. Monitoring real user experiences is the only way to ensure you are delivering the service levels expected by your users, and those who have not implemented real user monitoring will be at a competitive disadvantage given that users can easily conduct their business elsewhere.
Leslie Minnix-Wolfe
Lead Solution Marketing Manager, BMC
5. Hybrid IT Will Be The Next Big Thing
Hybrid Cloud was so 2011! In this new world of choices, business will expect hybrid IT: a combination of on-site and off-site; cloud and legacy; private and public; physical and virtual; social and secure; enterprise and consumer; desktop and server; mobile and static. Business will also expect IT to make them work together, whether IT owns the service or not. IT must act as a trusted advisor, as a service broker, and as quality assurance for this brave new world of complex Hybrid IT.
Andi Mann
VP of Strategic Solutions, CA Technologies
6. APM Spans Entire Application Delivery Chain
Applications have evolved with a greater share of the execution shifting from servers to the client’s browser to satisfy the demand for rich web experiences. In addition, many application functions are now outsourced to third-party services, essentially making your application a collection of integrated services with a rich front end. The average web transaction now involves more than eight domains, the majority of them outside your firewall. This dependence on outside services will only grow in 2012 and require APM offerings that span the entire application delivery chain.
Steve Tack
CTO of Compuware's Application Performance Management (APM) business
7. Virtualization Management Becomes Irrelevant
2012 will see management of both physical and virtual environments become the norm in all management tool sets. For most organizations, virtualization management is now considered less important as a capability, which we believe is because many now expect it as standard.
Maxine Holt
Analyst at Ovum
In January 2009 I predicted in 3-5 years Virtual System Management vendors will no longer survive, as virtualization becomes a core part of the enterprise compute fabric. Three years later this trend has definitely started, and will accelerate in 2012 as IT turns instead to hybrid IT management, recognizing that silos of standalone virtualization management is a costly and inefficient burden. Maybe 2012 is not the end of Virtualization Management, but it is going to be the start of the demise.
Andi Mann
VP of Strategic Solutions, CA Technologies
8. ITSM Goes Mobile
Mobile IT service management apps will transform the challenge of IT consumerization into a business advantage. Cloud provisioning, for example, will accelerate when employees can request services from easy-to-use self-service applications on their smartphones. Change and release cycles will spin faster when managers review and process requests on their tablets, and businesses will act smarter when executives act on real-time key performance indicators (KPIs) anywhere, anytime.
Alf Abuhajleh
Sr. Solution Marketing Manager, BMC
Once companies start to deploy mobile applications, inevitably, questions will arise: How will IT manage the application? Will your users have a good mobile experience? And, how do you ensure transaction success? While IT organizations are often able to monitor and manage their traditional IT environments effectively, the solutions they are using may not be adequate for the new complexity that mobility brings. In order to continue to offer the same or higher quality of service IT will need an approach to monitoring the end to end health of the mobile business services – from the application through the device, carriers and back end infrastructure. All of these elements can have an impact on the mobile end user experience, and the business and IT will definitely want to know about problems before reading about them on Twitter or Facebook or somewhere else on-line.
Sonja Hickey
Product Marketing Manager, HP Software Operations Center
9. Community Sharing and Social Collaboration Becomes Key for APM
Community sharing and social collaboration will grow in importance when it comes to managing your IT environment. IT increasingly wearing multiple hats, have less time and need more actionable information at their finger tips. Vendors will need to integrate their offerings with an engaging community for IT to share best practices, templates, tips and tricks with their peers across the globe.
Suku Krishnaraj
Senior VP of Product Strategy, SolarWinds
10. Demand for Transaction Monitoring Intensifies
Following several years of strong adoption from “transaction obsessed” organizations like insurers, trading houses, and credit card processors, demand for transaction monitoring technology will intensify across all verticals and application areas. Many enterprises are completing their deployments of end user experience monitors and deep dive component monitors in 2011 and finding they still struggle to isolate performance problems in distributed applications and need the additional visibility transaction monitoring provides. In parallel, new approaches to transaction monitoring are much easier to deploy and provide a fuller profile of a transaction than their predecessors, making them much more appealing to mainstream buyers.
Marc Borbas
VP of Marketing, INETCO
11. The Rise of DevOps
To remain competitive, more mature organizations will invest in DevOps solutions that combine application release automation with APM in order to deliver high quality apps, faster, and at lower cost.
Leslie Minnix-Wolfe
Lead Solution Marketing Manager, BMC
The rise of DevOps has focused on how operations can streamline the release process and hand deployment responsibilities over to developers (especially when implementing continuous deployment), which will free operations up for managing the infrastructure environment and performance testing and management.
Maxine Holt
Analyst at Ovum
12. Transformation of IT Teams from Operations-Driven to Value-Driven
The successful IT organization must transform itself from an operations-driven organization that maintains custody of infrastructure components to a value-driven organization that intelligently brokers services.
Chris O’Malley
CEO, Nimsoft
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