A research report by analyst firm Quocirca has named 2012 the ‘Year of APM’ [application performance management]. That’s based on a survey of 500 senior IT and business leaders who were asked which initiatives have the highest priority.
Respondents were asked to rank 15 initiatives in terms of prioritisation; application performance management (APM) came out on top by a considerable margin, beating private cloud, virtualisation, customer-facing applications and public cloud – among others – to the top spot.
"APM came out higher than everything else by quite a margin, which was quite surprising," Bob Tarzey, Quocirca analyst and co-author of the report, told CBR.
Michael Allen, EMEA sales director at performance and systems management firm Compuware, which commissioned the research, said that APM has risen up the agenda for a number of reasons. "I think there have been a few shifts this year, for example from systems management towards service management.," he told us. "Within service management it used to all be about availability management but now applications management has come out as something that is understood across all levels of IT and the business."
Wikipedia defines APM as, "The discipline within systems management that focuses on monitoring and managing the performance and availability of software applications."
The research by Quocirca also found that while a priority, APM is causing some issues for some companies. For example, 82% of CIOs and 66% of all IT executives agreed that users will expect better performance, such as faster page loads, from their online applications in 2012. But 43% of CIOs are not confident that their organisations will be able to meet increased demand without improving their current application performance management (APM) capabilities.
This of course plays well into Compuware’s current positioning – the company has been making considerable noise in APM since the acquisitions of cloud-based monitoring network Gomez for $295m in 2009, which it followed up with the $256m acquisition of on-premise application management firm dynaTrace in July of last year.
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The research also found that 80% of executives say that their application monitoring should be more proactive to accelerate problem resolution and improve user experience; 76% of executives say that monitoring of their applications needs to start with the user perspective; and almost 90% of CIOs say they need full visibility of all user behaviours, business transactions, complaint resolutions, and conversion rates through a single APM system to eliminate time spent correlating between tools.
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