One of the mantras of today’s world is “excellent customer experience”. People are no longer willing to put up with the functional or ugly and hard-to-use products of days gone by. Now they want to be perpetually delighted, especially online.
Almost half of companies surveyed by Forrester Research in late 2013 said that mobile apps were part of their strategy of delight, and that number has risen since then. Such apps have to be delivered quickly, and updated regularly to keep up with customer demands. Yet, says Forrester, the danger is that faster delivery cycles without appropriate application, infrastructure, and end-user experience monitoring can result in service delivery issues being detected too late by the business users whose productivity is adversely impacted.
Worse yet, in many cases IT support discovers the issues through customer complaints, and one-third of respondents said that the mean time to repair is over an hour for application performance issues. That delay costs money and may drive customers to seek other options. It’s clear that the current approach to application performance monitoring needs to change.
A siloed approach to monitoring, says Forrester, can detect technology component issues but does not show the business-service impact in terms of lost revenue or reduced employee productivity and, more importantly the effect on the end user, who could be an employee or a customer. It’s especially challenging when hybrid systems are involved. The datacentre and the cloud present discrete issues that may or may not overlap. Mix in the wide variety of endpoints, from tablets and smartphones to desktops and laptops, and you have a recipe for complexity.
You can, however, disentangle that complexity with IBM Service Engage Application Performance Management (APM). It offers end-to-end visibility into applications and their environment, regardless of where they reside, allowing IT to find and correct problems before the end user does, improving availability by up to 60 per cent, and reducing outages by up to 50 per cent. Should a problem arise, APM’s integrated analytics help find the root cause up to 90 per cent faster.
APM can be deployed on premise, as a service, or in a combination of the two, providing maximum flexibility. Not sure if it’s for you? Give it a test drive, with a free 30 day trial.
