Logicalis US to CIOs: Focusing on Application Performance Management Today Is Critical to Building the Digital Enabled Enterprise of Tomorrow

Solution Provider Identifies Four Steps to Unlock the Value of Technology in the Enterprise and Improve the Customer Experience

NEW YORK, May 24, 2016 – The goal for many CIOs is to develop a responsive IT organization that can proactively enable technology to provide business value to the organization by the most cost-effective means necessary. They are looking for ways to improve customer experience and deliver an environment capable of enabling “digital transformation” – easier said than done. Inside most organizations are many disparate technologies – servers, storage, network infrastructure, vendor and third-party tools as well as a myriad of home-grown and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications – that simply won’t speak to one another without costly, time-consuming IT intervention. To make the dream of a digital-enabled enterprise a reality requires the implementation of a software-defined enterprise where every device and network segment can be logically provisioned, connected and managed via software. But what happens if the applications users need to access are not up to the task in a hybrid computing world? Chaos isn’t too strong a word here. To help, experts at Logicalis US, an international IT solutions and managed services provider (www.us.logicalis.com), have identified four steps that are necessary to enable application performance management inside the software-defined data center (SDDC).

“You simply can’t build a software-defined enterprise without a focus on application performance management,” says Paul Williams, Director, Software Solutions, Logicalis US. “You must have the ability to comprehensively monitor across the entire enterprise computing environment, quickly identify the root cause of a service disruption, and quickly remediate the issue to satisfy end users.  Using application performance management software to better understand performance from the end users’ perspectives across hybrid environments, and then being able to proactively take action to ensure peak performance is delivered is becoming an IT operational requirement in the digital world.”

Four Steps to Enable Application Performance Management

As organizations are focused on delivering higher levels of customer experience, the perception of IT and of the organization and its brand at large will either soar or plummet based on the experience customers have with applications the organization deploys.  This is true whether the organization developed them itself or whether it is deploying COTS software internally or exposing it externally to customers or partners.  The degree to which IT monitors and manages how the applications are actually performing will directly impact perception. To ensure success, the following four steps must be part of any smart application management strategy.

1. Set a Measurable Baseline: In many organizations, there often is no measurable benchmark for how an application is performing. Perception based on feelings or how often IT Support’s phone seems to ring is not the best way to set that benchmark.  To really begin assessing application performance and plan a strategy, start by developing a baseline built on empirical data and analytics.
2. Shorten Mean Time to Resolution: No one wants to spend the day putting out fires. When applications don’t perform as expected, quickly identifying the root cause of the issue is critical.  It can be difficult, though, as there are many element monitoring solutions that are not integrated and do not monitor from the end-user perspective back through the infrastructure. The key is to get out of reactive mode and focus instead on instituting practices that allow for proactive – and later automated – remediation of issues.  Doing so not only reduces chaos, but helps IT anticipate problems before they happen and can lead to more automated responses to issues in the future.
3. Build Digital-Ready Apps: Even better than remediating problems quickly or automating remediation is avoiding them in the first place. By instituting a Dev-Ops strategy and the tooling that supports it, organizations are more likely to develop code with fewer defects and support challenges once it is released into production – something you might call “digital performance readiness.”
4. Report on Performance: Think of application performance management as a holistic science.  Combining benchmarking information with data about the supporting technologies (i.e., network, servers, storage), tuning, and remediation protocols with ongoing performance measurement is critical for continuous improvement and meeting SLAs set by the business.

Want to Learn More?

• You may be closer to a software-defined data center than you think; watch this brief video to learn more: http://ow.ly/4nkpjm.
• What are the six common characteristics of a digitally driven organization? Find out here: http://ow.ly/4nkqjP.
• Customer experience has become the tech industry’s new buzzword; discover why nearly half of all CIOs are transitioning to internal service providers, then download a Logicalis white paper, “Why Every CEO Wants to Lead a Service-Defined Enterprise and Why the CIO Needs to Make It Happen”: http://ow.ly/4nkqJK.

About Logicalis

Logicalis is an international IT solutions and managed services provider with a breadth of knowledge and expertise in communications and collaboration; data center and cloud services; and managed services.

Logicalis employs over 4,000 people worldwide, including highly trained service specialists who design, deploy and manage complex IT infrastructures to meet the needs of over 6,500 corporate and public sector customers. To achieve this, Logicalis maintains strong partnerships with technology leaders such as Cisco, HP, IBM, EMC, NetApp, Microsoft, VMware and ServiceNow on an international basis. It has specialized solutions for enterprise and medium-sized companies in vertical markets covering financial services, TMT (telecommunications, media and technology), education, healthcare, retail, government, manufacturing and professional services, helping customers benefit from cutting-edge technologies in a cost-effective way.

The Logicalis Group has annualized revenues of over $1.5 billion from operations in Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia Pacific and is one of the leading IT and communications solution integrators specializing in the areas of advanced technologies and services.

The Logicalis Group is a division of Datatec Limited, listed on the Johannesburg and London AIM Stock Exchanges, with revenues of over $6 billion.

For more information, visit www.us.logicalis.com.

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