Despite all the industry talk about APM SaaS, the majority of enterprises responding to a CA Technologies sponsored survey are taking a cautious approach to its adoption today.
The research found most organizations (61 percent) have no plans to implement APM SaaS. Twenty-four percent use APM SaaS in some capacity, but only four percent use an APM SaaS vendor to monitor all of their critical applications.
This does not mean the industry hype is wrong. This may simply be because of the limited offerings in the market. The adoption rate is expected to increase in the next year driven by application complexity and the DevOps movement as more comprehensive, full-featured APM SaaS solutions become available.
With this in mind, the survey found that approximately 15 percent of respondents plan to implement APM SaaS within the next year, with more than half planning to have their managed service provider deliver it.
“We believe one reason for cautious adoption is that many APM SaaS offerings are limited in functionality and therefore don’t meet the needs of the enterprise,” said Mike Sargent, general manager, Enterprise Management, CA Technologies. “The ability to proactively identify issues and rapidly diagnose root causes is where the value is, and today’s APM SaaS offerings don’t provide this level of capability.”
The survey also found use of on-premise APM and APM SaaS is expected to rise as the DevOps movement matures. By introducing APM early in the application lifecycle, survey respondents expect to derive multiple benefits including improved application quality, reduced risks and costs, and accelerated time to market for new services. As more comprehensive, full-featured APM SaaS solutions become available that can provide equivalent capabilities to on-premise solutions, broader adoption in large enterprises is expected to increase.
“We recommend organizations evaluating APM products ensure they are well suited to the needs and capabilities of both pre-production and production phases and that they will perform well across all environments, whether in the data center, the cloud or a hybrid environment,” added Sargent.
Conducted by IDG Research Services online among members of the CIO Forum on LinkedIn during August 2012, the survey titled, When It Comes to Application Performance, the User is Still King polled more than 100 IT managers and executives.
