Despite escalated industry talk about application performance management (APM) software as a service (SaaS), aCA Technologies-sponsored survey has found a majority of enterprises still taking a cautious approach to its adoption.
Nonetheless, the study expects adoption rate to increase in the next year driven by application complexity and the DevOps movement as more comprehensive, full-featured APM SaaS solutions become available. DevOps is a software development approach that builds on communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and IT operations staff.
The CA study was conducted byIDG Research Services online among members of the CIO Forum on LinkedIn in August 2012. It polled more than 100 IT managers and executives. The research found that 61 percent of organizations have no plans to implement APM SaaS while 24% use APM SaaS in some capacity, but only 4% use an APM SaaS vendor to monitor all of their critical applications.
"We believe one reason for cautious adoption is that many APM SaaS offerings arelimited in functionality and therefore don't meet the needs of the enterprise," said Stephen Miles, vice president of service assurance for Asia Pacific and Japan at CA Technologies. "The ability toproactively identify issues and rapidly diagnose root causes is where the value is, and today's APM SaaS offerings don't provide this level of capability."
Approximately 15% of respondents plan to implement APM SaaS within the next year, with more than half planning to have their managed service provider deliver it.
The survey also found use of on-premise APM and APM SaaS is expected to rise as the DevOps movement matures. By introducing APM early in the application lifecycle, survey respondents expect to derive multiple benefits including improved application quality, reduced risks and costs, and accelerated time to market for new services. As more comprehensive, full-featured APM SaaS solutions become available that can provide equivalent capabilities to on-premise solutions, broader adoption in large enterprises is expected to increase.
"We recommend organizations evaluating APM products to ensure they are well suited to the needs and capabilities of both pre-production and production phases and that they will perform well across all environments, whether in the data center, the cloud or a hybrid environment," added Miles.