APMdigest recently published a list of 12 Ways to Gain Faster ROI from APM, featuring advice from many of the industry's top experts about gaining a return on application performance management (APM) investments. In all the comments I received from the experts, one of the key concepts that stood out was the fact that APM can save you money, if done right, and this is one of the most important ways that APM delivers ROI.
Custom research just in from EMA VP Dennis Drogseth - conducted for CA Technologies on executive dashboards targeted as service assurance – showed the following rankings for benefits in terms of dollars saved:
1. Improved operational efficiency
2. Improved uptime for critical services
3. Improved company productivity
4. Reduced MTTR for critical business services
5. Reduced SLA penalties
Here is a closer look at these and other top ways – even some unexpected ways – APM can save your organization money:
1. Avoiding Costly Downtime
APM solutions provide organizations with a variety of business benefits by working to identify issues and resolving problems before they disrupt critical services that carry costly consequences.
Jason Meserve
Product Marketing Manager, CA Technologies
APM reduces or avoids downtime related costs - lost revenue, SLA penalties, etc. - by detecting end-user experience issues early before they adversely affect the business.
Benjamin Newton
Senior Manager, Application Management Marketing, BMC Software
Advanced predictive analytics APM can pick up on first occurrences of issues that if left unattended can bring down business critical systems. This type of solution pays for itself.
Michael Azoff
Principal Analyst, Ovum
2. Lowering MTTR
Application performance management (APM) can significantly reduce your mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) from hours spent in a war room with resources from all technical domains trying to figure out who owns the issue, to literally minutes on a conference call with the correct personal engaged in going red to green. This benefit comes from APM combining Top Down and Bottom Up monitoring focused on the end-user-experience (EUE). When a system event occurs or an application threshold is breached the fault domain is immediately isolated (e.g. network, server, middleware, database, etc.), so you know what resources to allocate for a timely resolution.
Larry Dragich
Director EAS, Auto Club Group
3. Pinpointing Issue Ownership Fast
The ability to pinpoint who an issue needs to be escalated to is probably the key money saver of APM. Most IT organizations spend quite a bit of time trying to determine whose infrastructure component is the cause of an issue and APM is critical in being able to shortcut that process. That is an area where there can be considerable savings in terms of time spent as well as in terms of remediating a potential impacting issue.
Jonah Kowall
Research Director, Gartner
4. Reducing Troubleshooting Time
When organizations experience performance issues, it’s all hands on deck. Senior network operations, server, database, and applications support leads are forced to drop what they’re doing and spend hours digging and isolating the source of the issue, chewing into time set aside for other projects they have on their plate. In a culture of efficiency, this kind of waste is intolerable. The business case for APM is simple: application performance monitoring software streamlines troubleshooting processes and lets more people spend more of their time working on the projects that matter to the business. The costs to run the business go down, which provides more funding to grow and transform the business.
Stacy Gorkoff
Director of Strategic Marketing, INETCO
Organizations that participated in TRAC's APM survey reported they are spending an average of 46.2 man hours on "war room" meetings per month. The survey also showed that organizations that are following best practices for APM are able to manage three times more users per help-desk FTE as compared to others. There are obvious savings in cost of IT operations that organizations can achieve by reducing the amount of time spent on troubleshooting application performance issues and identifying problems before they impact business users.
Bojan Simic
President and Principal Analyst, TRAC Research
By using a diagnostics tool, you can get insight into java- and .net-based application throughput, web services throughput, database performance, and, in some cases, browser performance. Such a tool complements end user performance management tools to provide required visibility into transactions behind the firewall. As an example, a good diagnostics tool has the ability to throw alerts on unique methods, allowing you to alert developers of potential bottlenecks or throughput issues in their apps prior to the app crashing and/or throwing exceptions. This greatly reduces the time needed to resolve an issue. For one of HP's customers, this resulted in a reduction in man-hours of approximately 10-15%, which translates into hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in cost savings.
Sonja Hickey
Product Marketing Manager for Business Service Management, HP Software
5. Keeping Customers Happy
Poor performance costs your consumers and you. Time literally is money. In some situations like e-commerce and search, poor performance leads to customers abandoning transactions and going elsewhere, or missing out on that auction bid or stock trade. Reduced productivity from poor performance increases cost as you need increased resources to achieve desired outcomes. APM is the tool you need to understand and optimize your performance.
Sherman Wood
Vice President of Product, Precise
By proactively and constantly monitoring your website, from the perspective of your end users, you can detect and resolve issues before your customers run into them on their own. Numerous studies have shown that website visitors will look to spend their time (and money) at someone else's site if your pages are loading too slowly. You must make sure your site is optimized for your revenue generating visitors. By deploying an APM solution, you are likely to find issues that you did not know existed previously (i.e. bad JavaScript, images that are too large, external dependencies, etc.), and most importantly, keep customers on your pages.
Dan Birck
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Nimsoft
APM increases revenue by improving the end-user experience - improving customer loyalty and positively affecting the brand.
Benjamin Newton
Senior Manager, Application Management Marketing, BMC Software
APM has a lot of implications for other types of IT investments – whether it is web statistics tracking or even CRM – in terms of being able to understand when users have issues from a customer service perspective. So there are definitely areas where you can leverage APM capability in other parts of the business. That is a unique way to save money with APM.
Jonah Kowall
Research Director, Gartner
6. Saving on Capacity Expenditures
APM allows you to avoid spending on capacity you don’t need. Your overall environment may have capacity, but a performance problem in one component of the environment can effect performance for consumers. Without the ability to see the performance details of the components in the environment, capacity may be added to band-aid over the problem. For example, adding additional application servers with data caching or adding more CPUs to the database (license cost too!) to deal with a slow database.
Sherman Wood
Vice President of Product, Precise
7. Accelerating Release Cycles
Modern applications and agile delivery processes require APM strategies that span the performance lifecycle. Whereas APM inefficiencies delay time-to-market and negatively impact ROI from application investments, organizations can accelerate their release schedules and increase revenue gains when they adopt a lifecycle approach. Release processes are more efficient when performance is proactively managed from the start, integrated into continuous integration, performance testing, etc. Likewise, overall problem resolution time will be reduced, freeing up time for more strategic projects across production, test centers and development teams.
Steve Tack
CTO, Compuware APM Business Unit
APM reduces app release costs by discovering problems with new releases that affect end-users early, and resolving them more quickly.
Benjamin Newton
Senior Manager, Application Management Marketing, BMC Software
8. Freeing IT Teams to Focus on Innovation
While the deployment of a robust APM solution helps organizations ensure a great end-user experience and the performance of critical applications, it can also help them realize other goals that work to save money in the long run. By implementing a good APM solution - one that can see into the application, network and infrastructure layers - companies can reduce troubleshooting and repair time, ultimately working to put IT teams in a proactive state so they can spend less time firefighting and more time innovating. With already stretched budgets, this gives CIOs the flexibility to dedicate more resources toward new applications that will support business growth without having to increase head count or sacrifice application performance and end-user experience.
Jason Meserve
Service Assurance Product Marketing Manager for the Enterprise Management Customer Solutions Group, CA Technologies
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