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Cloud computing, mobile computing and streaming are all rapidly growing segments of the IT industry. However, these trends add to the complexity and challenge of maintaining application performance to grow revenue, protect brand reputation and decrease costs for organizations of all sizes.

Managing this challenge requires visibility and deep-dive analytics across the entire application delivery chain to rapidly find and fix problems that may occur in the data center, cloud or the end user's device. At the same time, organizations are challenged to deliver applications with more features, in shorter cycles and with fewer resources than ever before.

"Application performance management is becoming a top priority for more and more IT organizations as applications become more distributed, mobile and dynamic. More than ever, IT leaders are challenged to maintain end user service levels and to proactively detect and remediate problems before they impact the business," said Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president of Enterprise System Management Software at IDC.

"The application landscape is changing rapidly with new native mobile applications, an exploding number of cloud services, elastic cloud infrastructures and a growing business drive to bring more application functionality to market faster," said John Van Siclen, general manager of Compuware's application performance management (APM) business unit, which recently announced solutions in mobile, cloud, big data and streaming that address top priority IT pain points. 

"A new generation application management system that goes well beyond traditional data center monitoring is required," added Van Siclen. "[The Compuware APM Spring 2012 Platform Release] addresses these new requirements while at the same time simplifying and automating away the APM complexity of the past."

The platform can be integrated into any existing IT environment. Its modular design with SaaS and enterprise options fit the needs of the largest enterprise as well as SMB customers who, until now, "considered APM systems such as this simply out of their reach," said Van Siclen.

Detroit-based Marketing Associates, a technology-enabled marketing services firm, manages thousands of client applications - enterprise and web applications - per year for global Fortune 100 companies across multiple industries and uses the platform to monitor application performance.

"The ability to really drill down and get to the root cause of a problem in a single dashboard view is outstanding and will save us hours - if not days - of troubleshooting," said Andrew Frey, CTO at Marketing Associates. "Having a unified view into the performance of all of our internal and client applications provides 'one-stop shopping' to finding and solving performance problems faster. Also, the flexibility to create customized dashboards for specific roles and purposes gives our customers transparency into the performance of their applications as well as ensures that we are meeting SLAs."

One solution on the platform is DynaTrace Enterprise, which provides deep transaction management for cloud and big data applications. Compuware officials claim that it offers visibility into both Cassandra NoSQL and Hadoop Map/Reduce big data environments. Its auto-discovery, auto-adaptive PurePath instrumentation enables deep cloud application visibility for multi-cloud (i.e. VMware vCloud plus Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and/or Microsoft Azure) and hybrid cloud environments.