Poor application performance can have a significant impact upon an organization’s competitiveness, according to a study commissioned by Brocade.
The report, “Why Smart Organizations Maximize Application Performance 2016,” finds that 74% of respondents agreed that poor application performance can prevent an organization from being a market leader. Critically, end-users (i.e. ecommerce customers) are usually the ones to suffer, regardless of the exact issues being experienced with the applications (or the deployment method).
The result is low satisfaction (36% for cloud-based applications/44% for non-cloud-based applications), delays (40%/36%) and fewer repeat orders (26%/29%)
Clear acceptance that solving these issues will lead to many benefits
Respondents reported that if application performance could be maximized, their organization would experience: 11% revenue increase (on average) and 13% productivity increase (on average). If speed could be doubled, 63% believed that customer satisfaction would improve and 44% customer loyalty would increase (44%)
Only a minority of respondents are completely confident about their applications’ current performance. Only 29% of respondents claim they felt completely confident that their organization’s applications can meet performance service level agreements (SLAs) during peak usage periods.
The gap in complete confidence between meeting performance non-peak SLAs (51%) and performance peak SLAs (29%) is concerning. While ‘only’ half of organizations are under pressure most of the time, the majority are suffering at moments that are the most critical to sales.
A majority or 76% agreed that their ability to maintain or grow market share is directly related to application performance during key periods of significant peaks in demand. A similar percentage of respondents ( 77% agreed that it prevents organizations from maximizing sales during peak periods. The extent of this issue is illustrated by the fact that 60% are more concerned about applications failing at peak usage times than they are about security – 50% of IT decision-makers say that peak usage times are difficult to predict
Cloud computing
The report also revealed that deploying applications on the cloud does not automatically lead to benefits.
While 61% report that their organization is using cloud-based applications, respondents are equally as likely to report that their organization encounters challenges using cloud-based applications as they are non-cloud-based applications (89% report that their organization experiences challenges in both cases).
Other findings of the report include:
Organizations are using hundreds of applications.
- IT decision-makers report that their organizations are using, on average, 329 applications (including 196 mobile applications)
- 63% of all respondents expect this number to increase over the next five years
- New applications are constantly being deployed – often to replace old ones (60% report new applications are always or usually deployed to replace old applications, rather than updating the old applications)
Mobile applications are particularly important.
- Mobile apps are most likely to be seen as important currently AND to be even more critical in five years
- 59% report that mobile applications are critical to their organization today
- 54% say that mobile applications are set to become more critical over the next few years
- 72% agree that almost all procurement of their organizations’ sales will be conducted online/via mobile devices within the next five years – ecommerce will be the standard soon, if it is not already
Departments are bypassing IT in order to deploy their own applications.
- Almost two thirds (63%) of LOB respondents report that their department has either deployed, or considered initiating, application projects without the knowledge of the IT department