Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2014.  Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed article by Srinivas Ramanathan, CEO, eG Innovations

Four Predictions for 2014

At eG Innovations' we believe that getting the user experience right will be critical in 2014 and will become a key success factor by which IT success is measured. Application Performance Management (APM) including mission-critical applications will be virtualized faster than ever, while return on investment will dominate discussions around management tools and processes.

1)      End user experience will be a key success factor by which IT success will be measured. Businesses will expect IT to find problems before their users do, pinpoint the root cause of the problem and solve the problem at the earliest. IT organizations will seek solutions that will allow them to provide great user experience and productivity.

2)      Application Performance Management (APM) will become virtualization-aware. Virtualization adoption will continue to grow in 2014. At the same time though, enterprises are beginning to realize that virtualization is not just yet another infrastructure silo that can be operated and managed independently. In 2014, we will see enterprises start to include virtualization as an integral part of their application performance management initiatives. Monitoring and management tools will also need to do the same - performance management and root-cause diagnosis tools will need to understand virtualization and its related dependencies to be effective.

3)      Virtualization vendors will seek to become application-aware. In 2014, mission-critical applications like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics will be virtualized at a faster pace than they have been in the past. Along with this trend, will be the need for faster and more accurate diagnosis and troubleshooting so administrators can quickly understand where the bottleneck lies - whether a slowdown is in the application or in the virtualization platform. Virtualization vendors will feel the need to provide tools that enable faster, deeper and better correlated performance visibility. IT will be challenged to go beyond a hypervisor-centric view and basic virtualization metrics and will need tools and processes that will help them ensure user satisfaction and productivity.

4)      Return on investment will dominate discussions around management tools and processes. The success of IT will hinge on impact to business. The same will be true of IT performance management tools. Performance management tools will need to help IT better serve their business by providing proactive alerts on business-impacting issues before users notice, by highlighting sub-optimal utilization situations, or identify optimization scenarios that will allow IT to do more with less.

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About the Author

Srinivas Ramanathan is the CEO of eG Innovations, an award-winning provider of automated performance monitoring and management solutions for virtual, cloud and physical IT infrastructures.