Executives to realise applications are the business

Compuware Corporation have released their application performance management (APM) predictions for 2013, offering an insight as to why it is becoming a new imperative for C-Suite executives.

Becoming the principal IT discipline, APM has become a central focus for IT operations with spending of software expected to grow to US$2.14 billion by the end of the year, representing a 9% increase from 2011.

“2013 will be another year of accelerated change in the application management space, especially as C-level executives who care about brand, loyalty, revenue and profitability become fluent in the capabilities of new generation APM,” says John Van Siclen, GM of Compuware’s APM business unit.

“Applications are only getting more complex, new dynamic environments like cloud and big data are going mainstream, mobile applications will be industrialised and application release cycles are shortening

" As a result, moving from traditional APM tools to modern APM systems to manage and optimise application performance will be essential for businesses that want to stay ahead of the game.”

Compuware’s top five 2013 APM predictions are:

· Complexity will continue to accelerate around management of business critical apps:

IT environments continue to become more complex - at the edge of the internet, in the cloud and in the data center - increasing the need for new generation APM with unified, real-time insight across the application delivery chain, including third-party and cloud services.

This insight, coupled with deep 24/7 visibility, enables organisations to optimise application performance from the user’s device, through the cloud, across all data center tiers to a system of record and back again, preventing potential problems from having an impact on users.

·     Performance analytics will become a requirement for a complete APM strategy:

Organisations now collect unprecedented volumes of data.

The key to making sense of this will be systems that automate analytics and deliver actionable insight and answers, not just more data. Increasingly, new generation APM will provide a unified system for all stakeholders.

Business owners will use it to obtain immediate insight needed to ensure that applications effectively support business goals and that IT has the transaction-pure detail needed to optimise application performance and assure stability and scalability.

·     The mobile surge will drive the industrialisation of mobile applications:

Users now access applications from an unprecedented number of mobile devices and apps.

Mobile applications are maturing to become the primary engagement model in many markets, from financial services to eCommerce, and the sustained mobile explosion continues to fuel the ever-growing performance expectations of end users.

Modern APM simplifies mobile complexity and enables optimised applications, so organisations can keep businesses competitive amidst a rapidly changing landscape.

·     APM will become a strategic component of big data:

Big data is trending from experimental projects to becoming an enterprise-wide analytics platform.

Expanding data volume, variety, velocity and complexity necessitates a new approach to enterprise analytics. Integrating new generation APM into big data environments will become a best practice for organisations to eliminate risks and costs associated with poor performance, availability and scalability.

As early adopters are discovering, big hardware does not necessarily mean faster big data apps.

·     A lifecycle approach to APM will drive adoption of DevOps and agile operations:

Leading organisations are already using new generation APM to support unified management of the application lifecycle development, testing and production.

With DevOps and Agile gaining ground, more organisations will take a lifecycle approach to APM.

By using a lifecycle approach, redundant, time-consuming tasks are automated, and business processes across traditional silos are dramatically improved.

This means faster applications, faster time-to-market, and the elimination of issues before they become problems in production.