Ninety-Six Percent Of Companies Run Virtual Apps

The vast majority of companies are migrating apps to virtual environments and APM vendors are revamping their products accordingly, a new study has found.

Summary of findings:

Ninety-six percent of survey respondents run at least some applications in on-premise virtualized environments; of those, 62 percent are extending their APM tools into those virtualized environments.

Nearly 60 percent of respondents run some apps in the public cloud--which can mean limited access to critical APM data.

Respondents are divided about vendors' cloud-related offerings: 49 percent of respondents currently using APM say the lack of adequate APM tools is a barrier to cloud services adoption; 42 percent say it's not.

HP is the leading APM vendor, with 53 percent market share, followed by IBM (35 percent) and CA (23 percent).

Respondents who don't use APM cited lack of in-house expertise in APM systems (50 percent), product expense (41 percent) and staff time to implement (32 percent) as the top three reasons.

75 percent of respondents not currently using APM say they're open to evaluating APM tools in the future -- the growing body of APM trialware and freeware is likely to appeal to them.

Comment from Lorna Garey, content director of InformationWeek Analytics: No doubt we'll see more apps being moved to public or private clouds, but that doesn't mean you just send them off and hope for the best. Most companies still need some form of APM to stay on top of things, and to get the right metrics for the business and its partners. They also need guidance in choosing and using the tools that fit best into their overall operational strategies.

About the report: Michael Biddick, president and CTO of Fusion PPT and an authority on operational management, ITIL and APM, wrote the report for InformationWeek Analytics, a subscription-based service offering peer-based technology research. The company polled 379 business technology professionals in its 2010 Application Performance Management Survey to find out how organizations are updating their APM strategies in context of virtualization and cloud computing. The report is titled "Application Performance Management: Reaching for the Clouds."

Contact: http://analytics.informationweek.com/join