Growing mobile device diversity and management was high on the list of Gartner’s 10 top strategic technology trends for 2014. Gartner predicts that by 2018 BYOD users will double, or even triple, the size of the mobile workforce.

Gartner’s prediction describes the new reality of IT management: the User is King. End users want to work in the most efficient way — whether they are sitting at their desktops, accessing a virtualized application from their personal laptop, or using their mobile devices. In order to maximize user productivity, forward-looking enterprises need to embrace this reality and adopt a monitoring strategy that supports all of the application types, devices and delivery methods accessed by their users.

IT operations understand they are facing a potential conundrum. As Pete Goldin, APMdigest's Editor-in-Chief observed, "Progressive IT departments understand that success is about serving the business goals of the company, and, from an IT point of view, that revolves around the End User Experience." However, at the same time, the growth of virtualization, of third-party cloud applications, and of mobile devices have all diminished visibility into End Users' experiences.

To meet this challenge effectively, IT operations must shift from a data center-centric to a user-centric computing model, and undergo a similar shift in how they measure performance and productivity. Meeting service level agreements on corporate server and network performance is no longer enough.

The popularity of Application Performance Management (APM) has shined a light on only one sub-component of End User Experience Management (EUEM), obscuring the fact that EUEM is a separate, multi-dimensional solution. EUEM encompasses the three primary components that dynamically interact to impact how End Users experience IT services:

- Application performance

- Physical, virtual and mobile device performance

- User productivity

With EUEM, enterprises are able to directly correlate the impact of IT on user productivity as they can see exactly what all of their end users are experiencing. This ability to see from the end user's "point of view" is especially critical as IT is tasked with monitoring, managing, and troubleshooting performance issues across the entire enterprise application portfolio, all of its device types and all of the delivery methods accessed by their users.

Companies who successfully pivot their "point of view" will readily monitor, validate and manage user experience no matter the application, the device or the user in order to:

- Automate monitoring performance

- Enhance service levels

- Promote business agility

- Optimize end user productivity

"EUEM is more than just monitoring application response times from the user's perspective," says David Williams, VP of Strategy in the Office of the CTO at BMC. "It is about understanding how IT consumers work, and empowering them to work smarter and faster."

In today’s reality of proliferating virtualized and cloud services, mobile device diversity and BYOD, the need for enterprises to see as their users see is more urgent than ever.

Trevor Matz is President and CEO of Aternity Inc.

Related Links:

Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013: Big Data, Cloud, Analytics and Mobile

Trevor Matz, President and CEO of Aternity, Joins the Vendor Forum