IT agility continues to emerge as a top priority for businesses seeking to quickly adapt to unpredictable market conditions and ever-evolving customer demands. Applications have rapidly morphed into the centerpiece of organizational growth strategies. As a result, IT teams will need to ensure applications and services are deployed quickly, performance is adequately monitored, and reliability remains a premium. And they’ll have to do most of this with tighter headcounts and modest budgets.
As development and testing timeframes shrink and operational environments continue to grow in complexity, there will be an increasing shift to conducting performance analysis (RCA and optimization) from production data.
We expect to see five interrelated trends, some of which emerged in 2013, take center stage in 2014.
1) Mobile Apps and Dynamic Web Technology Driving Change – Companies will need to increasingly understand the performance of applications in the browser. HTML5, coupled with dynamic web content technologies such as PHP, ASP.NET and RoR, essentially turn the browser into a processing tier. This needs to be addressed from a performance perspective, and monitoring solutions will be needed to measure this performance at the browser level and connect browser performance to transaction performance in the data center.
2) Market Responsiveness – Process frameworks will continue to be challenged, which will likely spell the end of traditional suite-based application performance management (APM). Applications are being integrated under an umbrella of services (e.g. Straight Through Processing, BSS to OSS); they aren’t off on their own, so there is a need for a new breed of APM that can do many things well – browsers, transactions, diagnostics, analytics, and tracing. These solutions will need to be easy to use and simple to deploy.
There is an increasing imperative to perform rapid, customer-centric, production-based analytics to resolve application problems and optimize service delivery. In the traditional setup, if you have a user that can’t access an application, an incident is logged, the customer goes through the service desk, and there’s an entire process that has to unfold. All of this collapses under its own weight. There is continuing automation of the service desk, and it dovetails with the time to market pressure, where people simply won’t have the time to be that rigorous in all of their processes. Accelerated development cycles, DevOps processes, and proactive APM will be required to support this new age of hyper-responsiveness.
3) Comfort in the Cloud – The march toward the cloud will undoubtedly continue in 2014. The emergence of private clouds and hybrid cloud environments helped accelerate the SaaS shift in 2013. More and more businesses are becoming comfortable turning to cloud brokers in an effort to reduce costs and offer a wider of selection of services to customers. APM, which has historically been deployed on premise, will continue to be increasingly cloud based. Cloud may never be the sole solution for a few verticals such as healthcare or finance where data security and consumer privacy concerns prevail, but overall cloud adoption continues to rise due to its lower cost, accessibility, and reliability.
4) Small Market – Emergence of .NET – There has been big growth of .NET and Microsoft in the SMB market that will likely continue through the next year. We see Java maintaining a leadership in the biggest and most complex environments, but new development favoring .NET, open source Java, or other technologies. These changes will put pressure on existing APM solutions to provide balanced capabilities rather than just expertise in Java.
5) Agile Development and Smaller Teams – With the relentless push for faster time to market deployments, smaller teams will have little to no time for testing to conduct problem determinations. The market is gravitating towards solutions that yield instant insights regarding both business and operational aspects of application performance. Tech pros are going to have to become intelligent generalists, with anyone in IT required to work in different environments. This puts the onus on solution providers in many spaces including monitoring, as product sophistication continue to grow, to allow people to deploy quickly and gain value instantly.
Not surprisingly, speed and agility seem to emerge in all of the aforementioned trends. Customer expectations continue to rise and many expect instantaneous service and value. Unfortunately, whether it’s fair or not, businesses unable to accommodate that need for speed will suffer the consequences. Investments in infrastructure, innovation and customer experience are mandatory to survive – let alone thrive – in 2014.