As an analyst focused on performance management and optimization technologies, I hear a lot of reasons for why businesses should implement these technologies. They need to improve their network and server infrastructure; they should have high visibility into activities; they need to boost connectivity between multiple offices.

These are all valid reasons for using performance management technologies. But in the end it breaks down to one key reason that is behind all of these and most other performance management justifications. It’s the applications.

This is of course a sort of “duh” statement. Obviously the need to improve application performance and reliability is the core reason for performance management. But this sometimes gets lost in the noise and hype around new technologies and cool features.

And when we are talking about the importance of improving application performance in businesses, we really mean a specific type of application, namely business critical applications. Making sure that an organization has a reliable and high performing implementation of their CRM or ERP system is key to keeping that business productive and reliable. And it is also important to make sure that a company is getting the most out of these high value and resource intensive systems.

For example, the implementation of a major ERP system will be accompanied by the deployment of tools specifically configured to monitor and manage the performance of that ERP system. The same is often true for CRM, Big Data or content management products.

In fact, when we asked businesses which applications they considered critical from a performance standpoint, enterprise applications like CRM were on average considered twice as critical as other business application such as video, instants messaging and corporate social networking.

In the recent Aberdeen report Achieving Top Performance for Business Critical Enterprise Applications, we look at how business critical applications drive the deployment and utilization of performance management solutions and we analyze how businesses work to ensure that these key applications perform at a high level and provide good experiences for end-users.

Related Links:

Aberdeen Report: Achieving Top Performance for Business Critical Enterprise Applications