AppDynamics Launches Business iq

Transcription

1 MARKET NOTE AppDynamics Launches Business iq Mary Johnston Turner EXECUTIVE SNAPSHOT FIGURE 1 Executive Snapshot: AppDynamics Launches Business iq Source: IDC, 2016 January 2017, IDC #US

2 IN THIS MARKET NOTE Since completing a $158 million round of venture funding in late 2015, AppDynamics has invested heavily to re-architect its core application performance management (APM) monitoring and analytics platform to take full advantage of machine learning and big data innovation. It has expanded its ability to monitor and correlate across infrastructure and applications data and improved options for delivering services using both the software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud model and on-premises software. In November 2016, AppDynamics introduced Business iq, a significant functional expansion designed to link application performance to business analytics. This IDC Market Note discusses how the company's architectural refresh and new product offerings position AppDynamics to more aggressively expand its market footprint among traditional APM customers and emerging LOB and DevOps buyers in Founded in 2008, AppDynamics designed its original Application iq Intelligence platform to support core enterprise application performance management functions such as unified application and infrastructure monitoring, end-user experience monitoring, and synthetic monitoring. While the company had a hosted services offering, its primary targets were enterprise customers purchasing onpremises APM software. Beginning in August 2016, AppDynamics expanded and rebranded its App iq platform to take greater advantage of modern machine learning and big data technologies. It also invested in more robust support for a new generation of DevOps technologies, including microservices, as well as support for public cloud services. At the same time, the company significantly improved the product's user interface, dashboards, and visualization capabilities. Rather than binding all new features and data sets to a single unified data ingestion engine, the enhanced App iq platform is designed to be more modular and allows the addition of new monitoring engines as needed to support new services and data types while maintaining consistent back-end data normalization and correlation functions across monitoring engines and providing access to unified customizable visual dashboards. The second half of 2016 saw the company introduce a new product packaging strategy built around the App iq platform. The product portfolio now includes a number of distinct application and infrastructure performance engines. Specifically: Map iq discovers and traces business transactions through the infrastructure and provides visual flow maps that are updated dynamically to display architectural topologies and dependencies. Baseline iq dynamically determines baseline performance metrics and thresholds for business transactions and performance metrics to enable more predictive alerting. Machine learning identifies normal behavior for each transaction and metric, which are used to set healthy rules to automatically trigger alerts when deviations from the baseline are detected. Diagnostic iq provides deep code visibility and diagnostics using low overhead agents and patented pattern recognition algorithms to identify root cause. When problems occur, the system takes full snapshots of code, database calls, and infrastructure metrics to ensure all relevant data is captured and correlated. Signal iq, the big data platform anchoring App iq, reduces false positives by correlating and baselining data from millions of application, infrastructure, and business events and logs every day. A built-in policy engine can trigger notifications or automated remediation and scaling IDC #US

3 Enterprise iq introduces an upgraded role-based web-based UI that streamlines setup, mapping, configuration, deployment, and maintenance. Automated policies protect data access and enforce governance. Microservices iq provides monitoring, management, and optimization of microservices' architectures. Microservices often require many more application server instances than a traditional application environment. This can create monitoring challenges related to scale and elasticity, particularly when short-lived containers such as Docker are used to enable loosely coupled microservice deployments. Systems optimized for monitoring traditional monolithic systems often cannot tolerate these types of ephemeral connections. Business iq, introduced in November 2016, combines application monitoring and business monitoring to deliver a common monitoring and analysis framework for business owners and IT departments to achieve what AppDynamics describes as faster Mean Time to Business Awareness (MTBA). Capabilities include machine learning to analyze user session data, a more powerful query language to create derived metrics and intelligent segmentation, and out-of-the-box funnel visualizations. Business iq is fully integrated with the App iq platform and analyzes data provided from the full range of AppDynamics application, end user, and infrastructure monitoring performance engines along with third-party data sources. AppDynamics solutions are available in two editions. The free AppDynamics Lite and the paid Pro Editions focus on the needs of traditional APM users, while the Peak Editions offer activation of Business iq as well as all APM functionality. Both SaaS public cloud service subscriptions and onpremises licensed software options are available. IDC believes interest in paid SaaS options has been increasing rapidly over the past year and is likely to represent the majority of new AppDynamics business from a revenue perspective by the end of IDC'S POINT OF VIEW Digital transformation initiatives are being embraced by many enterprises to engage more directly with customers and to create new data-intensive mobile and online business services. As more and more business moves online, many enterprises have placed greater business value on having real-time information about end-user experiences and business transaction health. Simultaneously, big data and machine learning are making it easier to probe this type of data for patterns and insights that can directly impact customer relationships and the amount of revenue flowing from online and mobile services. Modern APM vendors recognize the potential business benefits of applying advanced analytics to APM data to generate a new set of business insights. The introduction of Business iq positions AppDynamics to more effectively serve both its traditional IT operations APM buyers and its emerging DevOps and LOB analyst buyers. As enterprise-scale customers adopt more heterogeneous multicloud infrastructure strategies and rely on DevOps to accelerate the volume and frequency of application updates and code releases, more and more enterprises will need to put application and infrastructure performance into a business impact context. The recently enhanced visual dashboards and machine learning analytics will make the solution more easily accessible by LOB users. During 2017, AppDynamics will need to continue to increase visibility among LOB and DevOps buyers in order to create interest in adding Business iq to existing App iq subscriptions. The availability of Business iq is well timed to take advantage of rising market interest in digital transformation IDC #US

4 LEARN MORE Related Research IT Management Software Spending and Head Count Increases Expected Due to Digital Business, Cloud, and DevOps (IDC #US , November 2016) IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure 2017 Predictions (IDC #US , November 2016) Business Agility Is Top IT Strategy Driver (IDC #US , October 2016) IDC's 2016 Early Adopter DevOps Survey Shows Operational Models and Technology Spending Priorities in Flux (IDC #US , September 2016) Worldwide Application Performance Management Software Forecast, (IDC #US , August 2016) Worldwide Application Performance Management Software Market Shares, 2015: Year of DevOps and Cloud-Driven Growth (IDC #US , August 2016) Synopsis This IDC Market Note reviews the November 2016 introduction of AppDynamics Business iq and related App iq platform enhancements introduced during the second half of Combined, these updates and new releases position AppDynamics to provide more business insight and operational value to traditional APM buyers as well as emerging DevOps and LOB analysts tasked with managing their organizations' mission-critical digital transformation and DevOps programs IDC #US

5 About IDC International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make factbased decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries worldwide. For 50 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media, research, and events company. Global Headquarters 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA idc-community.com Copyright Notice This IDC research document was published as part of an IDC continuous intelligence service, providing written research, analyst interactions, telebriefings, and conferences. Visit to learn more about IDC subscription and consulting services. To view a list of IDC offices worldwide, visit Please contact the IDC Hotline at , ext (or ) or sales@idc.com for information on applying the price of this document toward the purchase of an IDC service or for information on additional copies or web rights. Copyright 2017 IDC. Reproduction is forbidden unless authorized. All rights reserved.