A new international study examining application performance management (APM) problems and challenges facing IT executives and their impact on the business and on user demand found that nearly half of CIOs are not confident in their IT organization's ability to meet increased user expectations in 2012.

The survey, conducted by Quocirca for Compuware, also reveals that more than 80 percent of CIOs expect their business customers and users to demand better performance from their websites and applications in 2012.

Additionally, business leaders across e-commerce, financial services and technology sectors in the US and Europe indicated a lack of confidence in being able to meet these increased demands, reporting that they are currently finding it difficult to determine if their applications are supporting their business goals.

"The research results were very clear: application performance is the primary concern of the survey respondents amongst the various issues they were asked about, and the majority accepted that measures must be taken over the next 12 months to address this and improve the end user experience," said Bob Tarzey, Analyst and Director at Quocirca.

Key survey findings include:

* 82 percent of CIOs and 66 percent of all IT executives agreed that users will expect better performance, such as faster page loads, checkout, etc. from their online applications in 2012.

* 43 percent of CIOs are not confident that their organizations will be able to meet increased demand without improving their current APM capabilities.

* 80 percent of all executives surveyed say that their application monitoring should be more proactive to accelerate problem resolution and improve user experience.

* 76 percent of all executives surveyed say that monitoring of their applications needs to go beyond the datacenter and start with the user perspective.

* APM is ranked as the top priority of IT executives for 2012.

* An overwhelming 95 percent of all CIOs and 85 percent of all IT executives stated that APM will be more vital in 2012 than ever before.

* Nearly 75 percent of all executives surveyed agree their APM systems should provide value across the application lifecycle in order to optimize performance of key transactions, reduce release cycle times and improve the code being delivered to production.

* Nearly 90 percent of CIOs say they need full visibility of all user behaviors, business transactions, complaint resolutions, and conversion rates through a single APM system to eliminate time spent correlating between tools.

"This research clearly shows the need and importance of APM," said John Van Siclen, General Manager of the Compuware APM Business Unit. "There is no question that applications are more critical to business success than ever before, and that their performance must be guaranteed. Today's complex, dynamic applications start with a user perspective, not an old style data-center-first view. Rather than simply react to problems after they have impacted users, new generation APM is designed to optimize the speed of key transactions, proactively fix issues before they impact users, and dramatically reduce the time it takes to get new features and functions to market. In short, new generation APM provides a competitive advantage to those who wield it."

Compuware dynaTrace commissioned Quocirca Ltd., an independent research company, to conduct a study examining the problems and challenges facing IT executives in determining how their online applications are performing, their ability to meet the demands of their users, and their IT priorities for 2012.

In January 2012, Quocirca interviewed 500 CIOs, CTOs, IT managers, and production, data center and application development leaders from large and mid-sized enterprises from a range of industries across the US and Europe. The firm spoke with 200 IT executives in the US and 100 each from the UK, France and Germany.