As part of the Digital Experience Monitoring - Telco's Next Gamechanger' campaign, The Fast Mode spoke to Antony Edwards who is the COO of Eggplant on how DEM is shaping enterprise IT monitoring as the adoption of Cloud and SaaS becomes increasingly widespread, and as the 'new normal' introduced by the recent pandemic creates new security vulnerabilities and performance implications. The interview is as follows:
Why is there so much interest in DEM?
Digital is the primary touch-point most businesses have with their customers and in a COVID world, it’s often the ONLY touch-point they have. So ensuring that they are presenting a digital experience that delights their users, helps them achieve their desired outcomes, and helps the business achieve its business outcomes is critical.
Antony Edwards, COO Eggplant
How does DEM change existing enterprise IT and application performance monitoring?
For the VAST majority of IT teams today, monitoring and APM really just means “is the server up”, what we call “availability monitoring”. Most IT teams think “digital experience” is something that the marketing team does in isolation … it’s just changing colors isn’t it? But the most important factor for DEM is application performance, the next most important is workflow, and it changes constantly as new browsers and mobile versions are released to customers, so IT absolutely has to believe that DEM is part of their responsibility and engage with Marketing, Product, and others.
What are your key solutions for DEM?
Eggplant helps bring the business, development, and IT together through its DAI platform. Eggplant monitors real users in production and understands what impacts their digital experience (e.g. their decision to buy, or their decision to complete a patient record), alerts IT teams of changes, but also feeds this back into the development process via testing. So if a developer makes a change that will negatively impact customers, it is immediately flagged as an error as part of the development cycle.
What are some of the challenges you foresee in getting more enterprises to adopt DEM?
Culture and Collaboration. IT teams (and others) need to realize that DEM is their responsibility, but not theirs alone, and so they have to collaborate with other teams to ensure the business as a whole is presenting a first-class digital experience.
