Compuware Corporation (Nasdaq: CPWR), the technology performance company, today announced its top application performance management (APM) predictions for 2013 and insight on why APM is becoming a new imperative for C-Suite executives. APM is the principal IT discipline enabling organizations to assure the performance, availability and value of business-critical applications. 

According to Gartner, Inc., APM has become a central focus for IT operations. By the end of 2012, Gartner estimates global spending for APM software will grow to $2.14 billion, up 9% over the $2 billion spent in 2011.i

In today’s era of the digital enterprise, two primary forces are driving the evolution of the APM market: 

1. A growing realization by executives that applications are the business, and application performance impacts customer loyalty, sales and profits.

2. A new generation of APM solutions has emerged that are fundamentally different from traditional APM. Modern APM isn’t just another IT “tool.” It’s an application management system that ensures enterprise-wide application performance, allowing companies to speed new releases to market, proactively eliminate issues before they impact users, reduce application management costs and increase application profitability. 

APM will also play a leading role helping organizations gain value from major technologies identified by analysts and industry influencers as priorities in 2013. Compuware’s top five 2013 APM predictions are:

• Prediction 1: Complexity Will Continue to Accelerate Around Management of Business Critical Apps. IT environments continue to become more complex--at the edge of the internet, in the cloud and in the data center--increasing the need for new generation APM with unified, real-time insight across the application delivery chain, including third-party and cloud services. This insight, coupled with deep 24/7 visibility, enables organizations to optimize application performance from the user’s device, through the cloud, across all data center tiers to a system of record and back again, preventing potential problems from having an impact on users.

• Prediction 2: Performance Analytics Will Be a Requirement For a Complete APM Strategy. Organizations now collect unprecedented volumes of data. The key to making sense of this will be systems that automate analytics and deliver actionable insight and answers, not just more data. Increasingly, new generation APM will provide a unified system for all stakeholders. Business owners will use it to obtain immediate insight needed to ensure that applications effectively support business goals and that IT has the transaction-pure detail needed to optimize application performance and assure stability and scalability.

• Prediction 3: The Mobile Surge Will Drive the Industrialization of Mobile Applications. Users now access applications from an unprecedented number of mobile devices and apps. Mobile applications are maturing to become the primary engagement model in many markets, from financial services to e-Commerce, and the sustained mobile explosion continues to fuel the ever-growing performance expectations of end users. Modern APM simplifies mobile complexity and enables optimized applications, so organizations can keep businesses competitive amidst a rapidly changing landscape.

• Prediction 4: APM Will Become a Strategic Component of Big Data. Big data is trending from experimental projects to becoming an enterprise-wide analytics platform. Expanding data volume, variety, velocity and complexity necessitates a new approach to enterprise analytics. Integrating new generation APM into big data environments will become a best practice for organizations to eliminate risks and costs associated with poor performance, availability and scalability. As early adopters are discovering, big hardware does not necessarily mean faster big data apps.

• Prediction 5: A Lifecycle Approach to APM Will Drive Adoption of DevOps and Agile Operations. Leading organizations are already using new generation APM to support unified management of the application lifecycle--development, testing and production. With DevOps and Agile gaining ground, more organizations will take a lifecycle approach to APM. By using a lifecycle approach, redundant, time-consuming tasks are automated, and business processes across traditional silos are dramatically improved. This means faster applications, faster time-to-market, and the elimination of issues before they become problems in production.

“2013 will be another year of accelerated change in the application management space, especially as C-level executives who care about brand, loyalty, revenue and profitability become fluent in the capabilities of new generation APM,” said John Van Siclen, General Manager of Compuware’s APM business unit. “Applications are only getting more complex, new dynamic environments like cloud and big data are going mainstream, mobile applications will be industrialized and application release cycles are shortening. As a result, moving from traditional APM tools to modern APM systems to manage and optimize application performance will be essential for businesses that want to stay ahead of the game.”

Compuware APM® is the industry’s leading solution for optimizing the performance of web, non-web, mobile, streaming and cloud applications. Driven by end-user experience, Compuware APM provides the market’s only unified APM coverage across the entire application delivery chain—from the edge of the internet through the cloud to the datacenter. Compuware APM helps customers deliver proactive problem resolution for greater customer satisfaction, accelerate time-to-market for new application functionality and reduce application management costs through smarter analytics and advanced APM automation.

With more than 4,000 APM customers worldwide, Compuware is recognized as a leader in the “Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring” report. To read more about Compuware’s leadership in the APM market, click here.