In order to provide APM as a managed service, telecom carriers need to partner with technology vendors that provide these capabilities. Even though there are more than 40 vendors offering application performance management solutions, not all of these products are suitable for carriers.
In order to be truly successful in providing APM as a managed service, carriers need to partner with technology vendors that would allow them to address key pain points of application performance management from both operational and business perspectives.
Carriers don't need to be able to manage the application itself in order to provide application SLAs. Instead, they need a set of tools for managing the delivery of applications from a data center to business users.
For example, Virtela offers SLAs around response times and the only capabilities it needs for this service are WAN optimization and APM solutions delivered from 40 to 50 cloud locations.
The APM market keeps evolving, and to be clear, organizations are not asking for services that would enable them to manage application performance over the network. Instead, they are looking for services that would allow them to achieve their top goal for application performance management - preventing performance issues before end-users are affected.
Many businesses are realizing that the number of help desk complaints is not a measure of how well they are handling critical application performance management.