As part of the Digital Experience Monitoring - Telco's Next Gamechanger' campaign, The Fast Mode spoke to Nik Koutsoukos who is the CMO of Catchpoint 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?
Companies must deliver a great user experience to their customers and employees to be commercially successful. Improving this experience is a top business priority.
The past year has revealed the blind spots in the way many IT teams have traditionally monitored digital experiences. With the recent rise in remote employee productivity, workers are accessing a variety of resources from unknown networks, reducing visibility and making it exponentially more difficult for IT teams to diagnose the root cause of technology failures.
Whether organizations were on a digital transformation before March of this year, or the pandemic has accelerated such strategies, the need for a user experience-based monitoring strategy is now a top priority.
Nik Koutsoukos, CMO, Catchpoint
How does DEM change existing enterprise IT and application performance monitoring?
Traditional monitoring mainly focused on what was happening inside the network and had no visibility into end-user experiences. Having visibility from all corners of the globe and monitoring from where the user is, provides a more complete view of the end-user experience. And while part of this measured experience is not under direct control, it can help with measuring SLA commitments from service providers and provide insights that can help for future capacity planning.
What are your key solutions for DEM?
There are many capabilities within the Catchpoint platform but in short, we deliver value in three main areas monitoring the availability, performance, reachability, and reliability of all digital assets wherever they are hosted - and manage the experience of users, both external and internal, customers, partner, employees, wherever they are located.
Catchpoint helps customers by offering a combination of Synthetic, Network, Real User, Endpoint and User sentiment capabilities in these three areas: Customer Experience Monitoring, Employee Experience Monitoring and Network Insights.
Platform users leverage the extensive built in test capabilities or create custom test to suit their needs. The Catchpoint portal gives access to rich actionable information, smart and customizable dashboards.
What are some of the challenges you foresee in getting more enterprises to adopt DEM?
Monitoring data continues to be scattered throughout the enterprise. For example, performance data from applications and infrastructure, IT operations alerting and event data, can be monitored by many departments across the organization. A core challenge is for IT Operations to develop a cohesive strategy that reduces these silos, and move to a shared model focused on improving digital experiences for both external and internal users.
But just as critical is having “buy in” at the top level of the organization, otherwise IT owners will continue to make decisions in a vacuum, and not align their departments against the corporate strategic initiatives such as those digital transformation projects mentioned earlier.
