The era of Application Intelligence led businesses Date:   Wednesday , October 08, 2014 Founded in 2008, AppDynamics is a California based company providing application performance management technology. Mobiles, Tablets, Phablets, Laptops and Services on-the-go are the new age adaptations of technology to drive businesses. Gone are the days when mobiles were used to store numbers, make or receive calls and of course, the occasional browsing for information. Now, mobiles and devices (laptops, tablets etc) powered by \'Applications\' are truly making the world a flat place and are driving business interactions across geographies and time zones, be it booking tickets, buying flowers, paying bills or applications that help us improve our abilities like playing a guitar or even being a better parent. At the centre of this technology adaptation, rather advancement, are \'Transactions\' and the related \'Applications’. So Transactions/Applications are the new business generators, not the teller at the bank or the florist in the shop and applications are becoming the system of engagement between consumers and providers. The applications space is booming and new applications are being built in the same frequency as old, legacy applications being transformed to adopt new technologies. Both new and old applications are being trageted to be consumed by users using laptops, desktops, mobiles, tablets and many others. Large companies are aggressively pushing their products through these mediums and this causing the technology industry to witness a disruption at unprecedented levels. The mom and pop phenomenon – Software is the new kingmaker An interesting aspect to consider is that this disruption has opened the doors for smaller players to compete directly with the giants, and this is evident across all verticals. Even mom and pop shops are now competing and providing better services because of the flexibility and the radical ideation. We\'re heading back to the 80\'s where it was all rock and roll and bearded techies cramped into garages working on software enhancements, as opposed to the hardware frenzy in the erstwhile years. In this competitive environment, users like you and me, transact with organizations that provide applications which have consistent user interactions that are responsive, error free and intuitive. This brings in the other dimension of invisible IT operations. For a user to interact and stay engaged with an app, the Holy Grail dictates that the app should respond fast, get the job done and not have any errors. That in essence ensures the survival and longevity of the app. If this hurdle isn\'t manoeuvred tactfully, cheaper alternatives crop up before you cement a user base. To give you a better idea, if the BlackBerry Messenger reports outages once a month, users would eventually move to a Whatsapp or another service provider. This is a critical and important factor for organizations to be successful. We no longer find the need to get in touch with call centres or support centres; we switch to a different provider to avail the same service. This not only means lost business for that single transaction, but a potential risk to lose the customer permanently. Similar to how businesses have transformed and adapted to the digital world, IT departments and CIOs have to adopt new mechanisms that work closely with the business. Their measurement of success should not be technology or infrastructure availability but what matters should be measured for success - \'Transactions\'. Transactions should be the new currency for CIOs and CEOs to measure success. With complex architectures and technology expansions (think cloud, big data, social, mobile, analytics), it is critical that IT departments understand applications and the transactions executed by these applications. Application Intelligence Pathway for Invisible IT Operations IT Operations that are driven through Application Intelligence will be a key to arrive at the goal of invisible IT Operations. At AppDynamics, we have expanded the scope of the APM market by introducing Application Intelligence tools. AI will provide the context and pro-active approach that is required to understand the impact of technology failure and more importantly, deterioration in performance. This ties into what consumers are looking for - \'consistent user interactions, responsiveness, error free transactions and intuitive offerings\'. CIOs who embrace Application Intelligence also understand the need to deploy solutions that empower the vision of invisible IT. These solutions allow organizations to automatically identify business applications and their related transactions and automatically link the transactions to the supporting infrastructure. These solutions should continuously measure transactions and classify healthy transactions from un-healthy ones. Un-healthy transactions should be automatically analyzed for root cause identification, diagnostics and remediation, hence minimizing business impact only to make invisible IT Operations a reality. These solutions provide an outside-in view (i.e.) User Experience to Backend Data centre as well as an inside-out view (i.e.) Backend Data Centre to User Experience, all this in context of the application and transaction executed by consumers. So not only are we in the era of Application led Businesses, but the era of Application led invisible IT Operations is in full throttle. With the proliferation of business applications, e-Commerce web sites and corporate portals, multiple reasons can cause server downtime, slow websites, bugs, malfunctioning etc... resulting in loss of revenues. If a website continuously fails to respond, the chances are that the user will seek out the ones that function fast and well. It\'s now, more than ever, we need our applications, websites and internal operations to run smoothly and to its fullest capacity. And in this endeavour, Application Intelligence stands out as the crucial ingredient.