Global survey finds Application Performance Management plays key role in addressing online customer experience issues

CA today announced the results of a survey of IT professionals on how companies view the online customer experience and how they are managing application performance.

The global survey, conducted online by IDG Research Services, found that a majority of the respondents recognise the importance of the customer experience and how it impacts productivity and revenue. It also revealed that 90% of the respondents believe the adoption of an Application Performance Management (APM) solution will create an effective process for detecting and resolving performance issues.

The CA-sponsored, vendor-neutral survey targeted IT professionals at organisations in the US, UK, Germany, Australia, China, Brazil and Mexico, with 21% of the respondents holding C-level titles. A total of 400 technology professionals participated in the survey, with 100 each in the US, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

Eighty percent of the respondents agree that understanding the customer experience when they are attempting to access online services is extremely or very important. Nearly 90% indicate that understanding the business impact of poorly performing customer transaction applications is extremely or very important. Among those who indicate that monitoring and measuring the end-user experience is at least somewhat important to their companies, 87% say that correlating transactional issues with application components and supporting back-end systems is extremely or very important.

“The survey found that while almost 90% of those polled understood the significant business impact of poorly performing customer transactions, only 70% believe they resolve these problems more than somewhat effectively. That means 20% of businesses have little or no way of knowing how badly their business is affected. This is something businesses can't afford, especially in today's economic climate when customer satisfaction and retention are so important,” said Andrea Lodolo, CA Africa Manager, Technical Sales. “It's imperative that CIOs use an APM solution to understand how their Web applications are performing and be able to quickly identify and resolve performance issues. Lacking this insight can result in lost time, productivity, customer relationships and revenue.”

Globally, 60% of the survey respondents most frequently associated APM with more effective processes for detecting performance problems and a faster mean time to resolution. They also recognise that a solid APM solution offers measured improvement of customer satisfaction relating to a successful online experience (58%).

Other key benefits include:
The ability to quickly perform triage and root-cause analysis of application issues (58%).
Increased IT resource productivity because teams can focus on new initiatives rather than root-cause analysis of application issues (55%).
Closer alignment between IT and the business because both can communicate with a common language around applications/data (48%).

“Monitoring and management are the cornerstones of a solid APM solution,” said Jasmine Noel, founder and principal analyst at Ptak, Noel & Associates. “By having instant visibility and control of Web applications and transaction performance, CIOs can get a better grasp of the customer experience and what it means to the company. A robust APM solution provides visibility across siloed applications running across the IT environment, while also affording all of the stakeholders the control needed to address critical problems as they occur. The result is more effective management of service availability, reduced IT costs and measurable ROI.”

The complete results of the survey are available online at http://www.ca.com/apm/survey. Additional APM resources are available at http://www.cio.com/solution-centers/ca.