Poor Application Performance Causes Significant Financial Losses

Compuware Corporation has announced the results of a study on application performance conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by Compuware. The study revealed that 64 percent of respondents believe that poor application performance results in significant financial losses for their organisations. Despite these losses, the study also showed that IT still takes a costly and reactive ‘fire fighting’ approach to application performance management (APM).

Additional highlights of the study include:

-- 47 percent of respondents stating that end users complain of poor application performance even when monitoring tools say everything is on target;

-- 64 percent of the time problems are not discovered until end users call the service desk;

-- When application performance issues are uncovered, 55 percent of IT organisations have six or more people involved in troubleshooting, diagnosis and resolution of poor performance in an inefficient ‘war room’ setting;

-- 58 percent of respondents identify growing application complexity as a key challenge, an issue that Forrester predicts will accelerate with the introduction of applications based on services oriented architectures and virtualisation technologies.

These results show that traditional monitoring tools alone cannot effectively identify performance issues and move IT organisations from reactive to proactive resolution. Complete results of the study, ‘Becoming Proactive In Application Performance Management’, further detail the business and technology problems that lead to these financial impacts, while highlighting recommendations for a more proactive, comprehensive approach to application management.

In the study, Forrester Consulting states that, “IT organisations that do not invest in application performance management tools that consolidate data across technology silos, including the multitude of applications that run in parallel, will not be able to deliver a proactive, holistic, business-oriented service to their customers.”

To meet these challenges, Forrester recommends a holistic approach to application performance management including ‘outside-in’ service management, which helps IT organisations understand services from the business perspective. Forrester also recommends end-user-experience monitoring, as clients’ impressions are the most important aspect of application performance, and a move toward proactive identification and resolution of performance problems.

“This study reflects the strong and interwoven connection between application performance and business results,” said Steve Tack, vice president, Compuware. “IT organisations need to start by understanding application performance from the end-user perspective to become proactive, to improve costly issue resolution and to avoid negative business impact.”

The Forrester study ‘Becoming Proactive In Application Performance Management’ contains complete survey results and is available at www.compuware.com/applicationperformance