As part of the Digital Experience Monitoring - Telco's Next Gamechanger' campaign, The Fast Mode spoke to Mike Marks, who is the Head of Product Marketing of Aternity 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?
IT has evolved from a “keep the lights on” mentality to strategies aimed to empower people to be more productive by limiting downtime, avoiding subpar application performance, or any other distractions that hurt overall engagement. Today’s tech-dependent, mostly remote workers won’t accept anything less than perfection when it comes to how they use technology to do their jobs, and the level of IT service they receive.
This is why leading organizations are placing a strategic focus on the digital experience of employees, helping them better understand the impact and ROI of all IT investments, going beyond just rolling out new technologies to uncovering insights into how people use apps and whether technology is inhibiting workers from performing optimally. Leveraging the power of DEM technologies gives IT the visibility and capabilities they need to empower employees to do their best work by proactively addressing issues and ensuring that employees have consistently pleasant digital experiences.
The future of work is morphing into a work-from-everywhere model, where employees may not work from the same exact location every day. DEM provides the assurance that an organization’s workforce can consistently get their jobs done free of IT frustrations, whether they work from home, in the office, from a coffee shop or in another country.
Mike Marks, Head of Product Marketing, Aternity
How does DEM change existing enterprise IT and application performance monitoring?
The components that make up DEM are not new, but by combining the right capabilities into a single platform, the outcomes that can be generated are truly novel. DEM is essentially an extension of end-user experience monitoring, APM and device performance monitoring. When combined, these give IT teams the end-to-end visibility that they need to best understand the health and performance of every enterprise application and device, and make impactful decisions based on that data.
In leveraging these capabilities, businesses are able to ensure that employees are not bogged down due to poor device or application performance and consistently have the tools they need to do their jobs. This level of visibility is a competitive advantage for both IT professionals and employees. IT professionals are able to quickly spot and remediate IT headaches before they turn into unbearable migraines, and employees consistently realize exceptional digital experiences as a result.
This is increasingly important as today’s digital workers have high expectations in terms of how seamless they expect technology to work, and consistently superior employee experiences allow businesses to both attract and retain talent.
What are your key solutions for DEM?
The Aternity Digital Experience Management platform brings business context to every end-user, application and activity to inform remediation, drive down costs and improve productivity. Aternity’s SaaS-delivered DEM platform delivers the only truly complete view of digital experience for the business, their employees and their customers.
The key components the platform delivers to customers include:
- End-User Experience Monitoring: Self-healing and visibility into the end user experience of every cloud, SaaS, thick client, or enterprise mobile app in a customer’s portfolio, running on any device.
- Application Performance Monitoring: Simplified monitoring that is scalable, easy to use and deploy, and unifies APM visibility across end users, applications, networks, and the cloud-native ecosystem.
- Device Performance Monitoring: Insights into performance and health of laptops, desktops, VDI, and mobile devices, along with self-healing to automatically resolve issues.
- Benchmarking: Compare your organization's digital experience to others in the market by leveraging the IT service benchmark data from millions of devices under management available through our Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q).
What are some of the challenges you foresee in getting more enterprises to adopt DEM?
The main challenge is the mindset shift that has to happen to pull the trigger on the investment. CIOs and other decision makers have been conditioned to believe that the investments they’ve made in domain-specific monitoring tools are sufficient in helping ensure optimal employee and customer experiences. However, this is not the case.
These types of tools are important investments and are great at what they do, providing IT with insight into the performance and availability of things like data center components, network infrastructure and device health. But they are not capable of measuring what end-users (employees and customers) actually experience when they use business-critical applications. This is where DEM comes into play, by providing that next level of granular visibility.
DEM empowers IT to become much more than a reactive player and evolve into a proactive contributor to the business. By making the mindset shift that the goal of IT is to ensure great digital experiences for employees, IT is able to properly evaluate the ROI of IT investments and go beyond rolling out technologies to having a big picture vision of how people interact with applications, and where improvements can be made.
