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James Bradley, VP, EMEAR Partners at Cisco AppDynamics explores the effects of the total application experience’ that end users now demand.
With people using a wider range of applications during the pandemic, their eyes have been opened to the incredible digital experiences that many brands are now delivering. Expectations for applications have soared and, at the same time, tolerance for anything less than the best digital experiences has all but disappeared. In the recent App Attention Index report from Cisco AppDynamics, 61% of consumers stated that their expectation of digital services has changed forever. Furthermore, 57% say brands have one shot to impress them and that if their digital service does not perform, they won’t use them again.
Now, as we look ahead into the year, brands need to provide compelling and faultless digital experiences at all times. This is the lens through which businesses should be considering every IT decision. And it is up to the channel to ensure customers have the processes, tools and technologies to deliver the ‘total application experience’ every time.
Channel partners must push performance agenda within client organisations
Channel partners have a huge opportunity to demonstrate expertise and educate clients around best practice when it comes to delivering brilliant, faultless digital experiences. In doing so, partners can set up their clients to succeed in this challenging new environment. For application owners who now find themselves in a never-ending innovation race to deliver the next compelling digital experience to customers, this is an important point to note. Yes, consumers now demand exciting digital experiences and they want these experiences to be tailored to their own individual requirements, but more than anything else, they just want applications to perform as they should, each and every time.
This is a critical point which channel partners should be continually reinforcing – in an environment where consumers have come to rely on applications like never before, performance and reliability have to be the first priority.
Application performance solutions are coming up short
Currently, many technologists find themselves without the tools they need to monitor and optimise performance across their IT estate. In the latest Agents of Transformation study, Agents of Transformation: The Rise of Full-Stack Observability, we found that as many as 74% of technologists are still relying on multiple, disconnected monitoring solutions, and this is making their day-to-day extremely challenging, if not impossible.
Channel partners must recognise the limitations of traditional application performance management (APM) tools in a dynamic technology environment and ensure they have the knowledge, training, and certification in place to help clients to transition to more modern, comprehensive approaches to monitoring – namely full-stack observability.
Full-stack observability is the foundation for the ‘total application experience’
With full-stack observability, technologists can get unified, real-time visibility of performance up and down the stack, from customer-facing applications through to core infrastructure such as network and security, and across both legacy and cloud environments. This enables them to quickly identify and fix performance issues before they impact end users.
But even with full-stack observability in place, technologists can find themselves overwhelmed by the deluge of performance data that is continually coming at them. Full-stack observability with business context enables technologists to move beyond the constant firefighting and take a more proactive and holistic approach to IT performance. And this is absolutely critical to meet customer demands for the ‘total application experience’.
The channel must act now to take advantage of growing demand for full-stack observability
For channel partners, the race is now on to meet IT demand and take advantage of this new market. Many are already making plans to expand their existing application performance monitoring practices into larger full-stack observability practices. In order to achieve success in this space, however, it’s essential for the partners to ensure they’re providing clients with a full-stack observability solution which can deliver in dynamic cloud-native and hybrid cloud environments. And one that is able to provide technologists with a business lens on IT performance so that they can prioritise the issues that matter most.
By doing this, partners can support their customer’s ongoing digital transformation initiatives and ensure that they’re able to consistently deliver the ‘total application experience’ that end users now demand.
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