Companies are beginning to view application performance management as an issue that requires coordination between IT and the business side of the house, Aberdeen Group reports
Lots of folks talk about aligning IT with the business, but it’s not always easy. Recent research from Aberdeen Group found that many companies don’t know how applications are used in key business processes and can’t easily determine how many users are impacted when there’s an issue with application performance.
Lots of folks talk about aligning IT with the business, but it’s not always easy. Recent research from Aberdeen Group found that many companies don’t know how applications are used in key business processes, and they often can’t easily determine how many users are impacted when there’s an issue with application performance.
As end users’ expectations of application performance increase, companies are going to have to step up their performance-management efforts.
“Organizations are increasingly looking to be more proactive when managing application performance and their IT departments are being tasked with a new challenge: how to identify and resolve potential performance issues before they impact end-user productivity,” reads the report written by Bojan Simic.
As part of its research, Aberdeen identified the top challenges for application performance: the inability to identify performance issues before users are impacted (cited by 61% of respondents); inability to measure the business impact of issues with application performance (49%); lack of visibility into end-user experience (46%); lack of visibility into business transaction flow through the enterprise (39%); and increase in complexity of network traffic (32%).
The research firm also found there’s a big price to pay when application performance suffers — for example, declined employee productivity (cited by 64% of respondents), decreased customer satisfaction (61%), lost revenue opportunities (41%), and damage to brand reputation (39%).
On the other hand, those companies deemed “best in class” reported, as a group, an 83% average success rate in preventing issues with application performance before users are impacted; 113% average improvements in application response times; and 99.4% average application availability.
Monitoring and analytic tools play a key role in these companies’ successes. Some of the technologies supporting these organizations’ efforts are tools for prioritizing network traffic, passive monitoring of transactions, application load testing, load balancing and network emulation/simulation.
To achieve best-in-class performance, Aberdeen recommends that companies: map business-critical applications to key business processes; develop capabilities for providing executives with visibility into the business impact of application performance; and develop capabilities for identifying and eliminating application performance issues in the pre-deployment stage.
Having such visibility can make a big difference, as the IT director at one manufacturing company found:
“Originally we thought that we didn’t have enough bandwidth to run an ERP application and were thinking about adding an additional T-1 line. However, a technology solution that we had in place helped us realize the root-cause of the problem was on the application side — not the network,” the IT director shared with Aberdeen. “This allowed us to avoid adding more bandwidth, but it also allowed us to be able to effectively manage application performance on an ongoing basis and address potential problems before they could impact end-users.”
Significantly, Aberdeen found companies are beginning to view application performance management as an issue that requires coordination between IT and the business side of the house.
“IT departments are not just looking for a buy-in from business management when trying to implement capabilities for managing application performance, but they also need help with understanding what business goals they are trying to achieve when selecting these capabilities,” according to the report.
More information on the research report, titled “Application performance management: Getting IT on the C-level’s agenda,” is available here.
