Next Gen App Management - III Secret Sauce

Challenge 1 : "Things" are the customer of our services

By 2018, six billion connected things will be requesting support...!  At least that is what the Gartner researchers are predicting for 2016 and beyond.  There's a lot to read between these lines.  For one - if you are still thinking on the lines of how to manage the 10 digit figure - you are way behind the curve of the 'Digital' side effects.  One would have to be more concerned on the "things" that will be requesting support.

Challenge 2 : End of Monolithic technology solutions

If 'Customer Need' is at the center of focus then no single IT player can satisfy the entire 'Need'.  The ingenuity of niche players have brought in plethora of tools in the application management market.  But the demand is only getting greedier for such innovative tools.   At the rear end though, as the environment is getting more specialized through such tools, it is also inadvertently turning them more complex.  The lego blocks of different technologies forming one giant solution do not necessarily work together seamlessly.

Challenge 3 : Squeeze down Cost to Spruce up Business Transformations

IT budgets would continue to be under pressure to reduce spending by 40% to 60% over the next 3 to 5 years.  Almost all new IT projects will ONLY be funded from making savings with existing IT costs.  Research has shown that organizations are spending up to 80% of their IT budgets in having to maintain and manage their existing portfolios and leaving only as much as only 20% to embrace newer functions and technologies which are absolutely important to sustain competition.  In the Application Services market of about 57b$  (growing to 75b$  by 2020), even assuming an industry average of 50% on Application Management that would be 29b$ (39b$ by 2020)!  That's a big pie to go unnoticed to be a target for cost reduction.

'Secret Sauce' for Next Gen Application Management Solution

Secret Sauce is in the AIR!  Automation... Integration.... & Rationalization. 

Secret Sauce 1 : Automation

Gartner has been recommending strategies distinctly different from traditional human-customer communication and problem-solving.  It would no longer be the case of automating workflows and process decisions but a whole new paradigm shift of incubating "Things" that would resolve incidents without human intervention.  Automation has the potential to bring cost improvements of up to 60% over traditional methods.

Secret Sauce 2 : Integration

The sum of silos of niche solutions could only be greater than the whole, only if they allowed integrated application life cycle management.  The Application Intelligence data, Portfolio blueprints, the Knowledge Management demon, Proactive and Preemptive monitors, Service Management platform, Process Workflows, Agile workbench - all have to be well integrated to drive Synergy.  Intelligently integrated application management solutions has the potential to bring down the cost up to 40%.

Secret Sauce 3 : Rationalization

Focus should not be just on blindly managing the applications but lead our customers in identifying applications that can be decommissioned, reduce the complexity of applications, provide flexible service levels matching the business need.  The core philosophy being to Manage - Transform - Manage more cost effectively.  Research and examples prove that Rationalization has the capacity for cost reductions usually up to 50%.

Take away:  The EXTENT to which the Application Management solutions can embrace the dynamics of AIR - Automation, Integration & Rationalization  -would determine the frontiers of their success in being the Next Gen Application Management solutions.