Brocade today published new research conducted with independent research house Vanson Bourne looking into why and how smart organizations are maximising application performance in 2016. The full report, “Why Smart Organizations Maximise Application Performance 2016”, is available for download now. There is also a blog post from Brocade which links to the report Blog content focusing on the central themes of the research http://community.brocade.com/t5/vADC-Blog/Bridging-the-Performance-Confidence-Gap/ba-p/86298

The study was commissioned by Brocade to identify and understand the challenges that businesses face in application use; from the IT department through to end-users. Consisting of 440 interviews with IT and line-of-business (LOB) decision-makers, from organizations with more than 500 employees, the sample included respondents from the U.S., UK, France, Germany, China, and Russia. The research aimed to identify: the importance of applications throughout the organization; strategies that are being used to guide application needs; challenges and efficacy of proposed solutions; and the impact on the business of applications not being used to their full potential (e.g. impact on performance, efficiency and revenue, customer experience and approach from departments beyond IT).

Key Research Findings:

Poor application performance can have a significant impact upon an organization’s competitiveness.

• 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 maximised, 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
• 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
• 77% agreed that it prevents organizations from maximising 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

Deploying applications on the cloud does not automatically lead to benefits.

• 61% report that their organization is using cloud-based applications
• But 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)

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