Survey Claims UK Plc Increasingly Frustrated With Poor App Performance

Application performance and availability is increasingly becoming a big issue for businesses, according to research commissioned by a vendor published this week.

The study, conducted by IT management software provider SolarWinds, polled 300-plus business application end-users across a spectrum of different sized UK companies.

The headline result: IT departments are feeling increasingly under pressure when it comes to maintaining app performance and availability. The key findings of the research included the fact that 94% of respondents think application performance and availability affect their ability to do their job, while 44% claim that these are "critical" factors.

The increasing adoption of BYOD – and consumer apps therein – along with cloud services, and an ever-more mobile workforce, means that the application delivery chain is becoming more and more complex for IT staff in terms of support and service, for example.

'Significant Losses' Due To Poor Performance?

Furthermore, one in five indicated that slow or unavailable applications meant a "significant" loss in financial terms for their organisation.

In a nutshell, the reliance on business applications is high, but end-user expectations are even higher – when a performance issue or downtime does crop up, users expect a very quick response, in some cases just a matter of minutes. So 30% said they'd want a solution inside half an hour, and 66% wouldn't be happy if an issue wasn't resolved inside an hour.

Meanwhile, 38% of respondents had in reality waited a full business day for a performance issue with a business critical application to be resolved; 22% indicated they had waited several days or even longer.

Suaad Sait, executive vice president, products and markets, SolarWinds, warned: "Applications affect nearly every aspect of our world. And not just business, but well beyond. Today, applications impact people's lives in ways never imagined just five to ten years ago.

"The resulting importance of application performance and availability requires IT to expand beyond infrastructure-centric management to add app-centric management. Beginning now and increasingly so in the future, this will make or break businesses. Ultimately, IT will be held responsible for application performance, regardless of whether the application resides on premise or in the cloud.

"It's no longer just about if an application is working; it's about that application working to end-user expectations. These survey results should be a wakeup call for IT pros everywhere."