Contributed ArticleFrom the moment we wake up until we go to bed, applications have become an integral part of our everyday lives. For example, a typical day might start with checking traffic or routes to work on a traffic app, looking at the weather forecast from the Met Office, and scanning the news headlines. And at this stage, it is not something we are often conscious of — we use our applications on autopilot.
This use of applications is pervasive in every aspect of our daily lives. We use them for everything from banking to sharing jokes with friends, to conducting our daily business interactions. In fact, the business focus on application use is particularly fast-growing, and increasingly application use is on the radar of digitally savvy organisations. In a recent Riverbed survey, 98% of business decision-makers identify the need to optimise digital performance as an essential component to business performance.
Given that our reliance on applications in a business context is significantly increasing, there is a corresponding rise in the importance of real performance. However, this is something that organisations are not currently managing effectively. According to the survey, nearly 80% of respondents indicate that poor performance impacts digital services at least once a month. With applications being such an integral part of achieving business results, clearly, this cannot continue. But how can companies get the best from their applications?
In a broader sense, technological advancements have played a huge role in business development over the last ten years. Trends such as cloud, mobile, containerisation, modern application architectures and bring your own device have all helped to improve the efficiency of business operations, reducing costs and saving time.
Perhaps even more importantly, it has played a key role in revolutionising customer service. But the challenge lies in integrating all the necessary solutions to perform optimally and deliver maximum benefit — particularly for customers.
Creating a reliable application for consumers whilst balancing this complexity requires a clear understanding of the daily interactions and transactions that they experience firsthand. And in order for this to be possible, effective application performance management is required.
But often, legacy application performance management solutions do not provide this level of insight, because they were designed with a much narrower scope in mind.
Rather than focusing on end-user experience, they are almost exclusively centred on capabilities that are best used for application development. However, the more advanced solutions have been updated to incorporate these crucial metrics. To evaluate the effectiveness of your current application performance management solution, ask yourself the following questions:
- Do I know what end-users actually experience on any device?
- Do I know all the applications we are using including on-prem, cloud, SaaS and mobile?
- Can I capture all the transaction and business critical information regarding transactions at large scale?
- Can we easily and quickly analyse the data, identify problems and improve the business?
A truly digital business requires a solution that offers visibility over all users, applications, data and transactions on a continuous basis. Businesses simply cannot afford to gamble on the shortcomings of legacy solutions. Best-in-class solutions instead combine the merits of application performance management with end-user experience management.
This pioneering approach allows companies to track the end-user experience for all applications and provides a depth and quality of insight that is essential for the modern business. Further, cutting-edge technology such as artificial intelligence can further optimise the capability of application performance management solutions, and consequently the validity of the insights provided.
Investing a short amount of time to establish the application performance level in your business can pay serious dividends. Try it now, your customers will thank you for it!
Key takeaways
- 80% of respondents indicate that poor performance impacts digital services at least once a month.
- A digital business requires a solution that offers visibility over all users, applications, data, transactions on continuous basis.
- Businesses cannot afford to gamble on shortcomings of legacy solutions.
Digital organisations need to ask themselves if they know how their application are performing for their customers, writes Elie Dib at Riverbed.
