Study Reveals Nearly Half of CIOs Not Confident Their Organizations Are Able to Meet Increased User Expectations in 2012

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DETROIT — Compuware Corporation (Nasdaq:CPWR), the technology performance company, today announced the findings of a new international study examining application performance management (APM) problems and challenges facing IT executives and their impact on the business and on user demand. The survey was conducted in January 2012 by Quocirca Ltd, and included 500 IT executives from organizations in the U.S., UK, Germany and France.

The survey reveals that more than 80 percent of CIOs expect their business customers and users to demand better performance from their websites and applications in 2012. Additionally, business leaders across e-commerce, financial services and technology sectors in the U.S. and Europe indicated a lack of confidence in being able to meet these increased demands, reporting that they are currently finding it difficult to determine if their applications are supporting their business goals.

“The research results were very clear: application performance is the primary concern of the survey respondents amongst the various issues they were asked about, and the majority accepted that measures must be taken over the next 12 months to address this and improve the end user experience,” said Bob Tarzey, Analyst and Director at Quocirca.

Other key survey findings include:

  • 82 percent of CIOs and 66 percent of all IT executives agreed that users will expect better performance, such as faster page loads, checkout, etc. from their online applications in 2012.
  • A surprising 43 percent of CIOs are not confident that their organizations will be able to meet increased demand without improving their current APM capabilities.
  • 80 percent of all executives surveyed say that their application monitoring should be more proactive to accelerate problem resolution and improve user experience.
  • 76 percent of all executives surveyed say that monitoring of their applications needs to go beyond the datacenter and start with the user perspective.
  • APM is ranked as the top priority of IT executives for 2012.
  • An overwhelming 95 percent of all CIOs and 85 percent of all IT executives stated that APM will be more vital in 2012 than ever before.
  • Nearly 75 percent of all executives surveyed agree their APM systems should provide value across the application lifecycle in order to optimize performance of key transactions, reduce release cycle times and improve the code being delivered to production.
  • Nearly 90 percent of CIOs say they need full visibility of all user behaviors, business transactions, complaint resolutions, and conversion rates through a single APM system to eliminate time spent correlating between tools.

“As we were preparing for February 2012’s Super Bowl XLVI, we needed a clear picture of how our applications were performing at any given moment, especially under load. We were expecting a huge increase in traffic immediately following our commercial run during the game. We knew we needed real-time visibility into user experience and the health of our critical business applications,” said Jim Houska, Enterprise Architect at Cars.com.

“We worked with Compuware dynaTrace(R) to move to continuous, real-time APM. Their PurePath Technology(R) enabled us to proactively identify and address performance bottlenecks prior to our Super Bowl marketing campaign. The end result proved to be extremely successful. Thanks to the unique visibility provided by dynaTrace and its less than one percent overhead in production, we were able to sustain both an immediate 1,800 percent spike in page view traffic and a subsequent load that was 40 percent above our normal peak, all while maintaining business performance and customer satisfaction,” explained Houska. Cars.com is visited by more than 10 million car shoppers each month, and is the leading destination for online car shoppers, offering credible and easy-to-understand information from consumers and experts to help buyers formulate opinions on what to buy, where to buy and how much to pay for a car.

“This research clearly shows the need and importance of APM,” said John Van Siclen, General Manager of the Compuware APM Business Unit. “There is no question that applications are more critical to business success than ever before, and that their performance must be guaranteed. Today’s complex, dynamic applications start with a user perspective, not an old style data-center-first view. Rather than simply react to problems after they have impacted users, new generation APM is designed to optimize the speed of key transactions, proactively fix issues before they impact users, and dramatically reduce the time it takes to get new features and functions to market. In short, new generation APM provides a competitive advantage to those who wield it.”