The Expanding Role of Application Performance Management

Anyone in customer service understands the importance of fast, reliable, intuitive customer interactions to reputation, revenue, and profitability. And in today's digital world, interactions depend on technologies and infrastructures, including enterprise applications, Web sites, mobile sites, apps, and big data.

But the increasing role of technology—combined with a global IT infrastructure growing more complex and unpredictable by the day—creates a dangerous combination. Fortunately, a new generation of application performance management (APM) has evolved to meet these demands. This new approach combines a view of end-user experiences with a deep-dive to identify sources of performance problems through the full technology continuum. Issue identification occurs in minutes, not days, improving efficiency in situations when seconds mean lost customers and revenues. In coming years, APM will elevate its role to maximize technologies and infrastructures that support great customer service.

Today's enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications—even those not CRM in nature—are designed to promote faster customer service. The key to ensuring the best application performance to support customer service begins with understanding and monitoring the end-user experience. Where ERP applications are concerned, end users are often employees and partners.

Improving Service Quality with Early Intervention

With new-generation APM, organizations can quickly identify when a group of users experiences performance degradation and then accurately identify and fix the root cause, even if that cause is outside the application itself. Working in reverse, new APM solutions also support techniques for network administrators to see what applications and/or end users are affected by performance degradations at network, system, and component levels. Ultimately, the result is more "application-aware" information and a broader, more accurate range of clues to help identify and stave off application performance issues faster. This ensures uninterrupted access and high-quality end-user experiences with systems, to promote adoption and an increase in organizations' overall quality of customer service.

Leading ERP vendors offer their own solutions for application monitoring and improvement. But with heterogeneous technologies deployed throughout the enterprise, organizations need consistent testing and measurement to provide a consolidated view of what's happening. New APM approaches provide this.

Finally, APM solutions can identify non-technology-related problems. In one example, a global organization with a widely distributed SAP system used APM to determine that slower transactions for a certain group of end users weren't necessarily the result of 

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