APM – Identity Crisis or Something Else?

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Recently, I’ve been reading a lot about Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring, as each company mentioned is leveraging the coverage for it’s own promotional purposes.

GartnerAPM-MQ-2011

Copyright 2011 Gartner Research

Having spoken with several of the companies on this list, and being the curious gal that I am, I thought I’d take a closer look at all of the APM Magic Quadrant contenders to see how each company positions and differentiates itself.

What I found was 12 unique variations on the “APM” theme from the 29 companies included:

  • IT Reliability™ software
  • End User Experience Monitoring
  • End User Experience Management
  • Application Performance Management
  • Application Management
  • End-user experience and performance management
  • Business transaction management
  • End-user experience and web application performance management
  • Real-time visibility
  • Unified service delivery management
  • Responsive process management
  • Application Performance Monitoring

Is this the inevitable product line extensions of a maturing network performance market?  Perhaps it’s the natural fragmentation of an emerging market searching for its sweet spot? Regardless, I identified three overriding commonalities:

  1. Each solution is very complex, providing lots and lots (and lots) of data
  2. Most are desktop centric – there is little to no support for mobile apps or Web
  3. Each company is primarily targeting IT or Network Operations

I did not see any targeting of the Business Analysts, Product Managers, Voice of the Customer executives or other app stakeholders.  Hey, us non-techies like and/or need data, too.  More than just network speed matters.  Oh, and remember your employees and customers are accessing your customers’ sites and apps via mobile.  The time to move is now.  If an organization’s goal is to improve application/Web app performance, or any of the other 11 “APM” descriptions, then the real visionaries will be the first to fill in these blanks.

Posted in: #webperf, APM, EUE, Uncategorized, User Experience

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