Innovate, Renovate, And Dominate – The Mantra Of The Digital Business

This was the theme for Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development & Integration (#GartnerAADI) conference, held in London on the 18th and 19th May 2015. We attended and showcased our Application Intelligence platform, and being an ex-Forrester employee I was excited to see how Gartner events compared. Firstly, hats off to Gartner, this was an extremely well attended event with 500 attendees. The majority of these were from senior IT executive roles – heads of operations, applications and architecture – so it was a great event to attend.

AppDynamics At Gartner ADDI, London, 19th May 2015

So What Does Digital Business Mean?

For the opening keynote, Daryl Plummer gave a very polished and engaging speech on “Powering Success In The New Digital Economy”. It was a great keynote focused on how digital is changing the rules of business. In summary Gartner, defines digital business as:

Gartner Definition Of Digital Business, Gartner ADDI Event, May 2015

Put a bit more simply, my view is that Digital Business is all about utilizing new technologies such as mobile, wearables and IoT (Internet of Things) devices in order to deliver business services, that:

Externally, engage and delight customers in order to build brand loyalty
Internally, optimize employee productivity

Software Strategy Is Key To Digital Business

At AppDynamics, we see that every business today is software defined. Digital and software go together like strawberries and cream, because a smartphone is only smart via its apps, and an IoT device is a just a ‘thing’ without apps. Therefore it’s a businesses software strategy, which is key to success in the digital economy. In fact, if I were to put my analyst hat back on, I would say that that applications fuel digital touch points.

Tech Spend Is Shifting In The Digital Business

The importance of tech and software means that responsibility and accountability for these areas is no longer just within the realms of IT. In the keynote, Daryl mentioned that today, 38% of IT spend is outside of IT and this will be 50% by 2017. At AppDynamics, we have seen this shift happening with new clients, such as DigitasLBi , a global marketing and technology agency choosing our platform, and an increasing interest in our Application Analytics solution from marketing and product management roles.

Exploit Business Moments For Competitive Advantage

One of the key lessons from the keynote and repeated through the event, was the importance of “business moments”. Gartner defines a business moment as a “transient opportunity that is exploited dynamically” by a digital business. My take on this is that they are brief moments of interaction between people (customers, employees or partners) and businesses that can provide value to both parties. Increasingly, for the digital business, they are delivered using digital technologies and associated apps. These interactions, if exploited and managed correctly (an appropriate experience is delivered), are key to competitive advantage in the digital economy.

Apps Deliver Business Moments, So Management Is Essential

For me, the keynote plus a number of other sessions that focused on software development and DevOps, highlighted the importance of apps in the digital business. Ultimately it’s a digital businesses software strategy and apps, which are key to delivering successful business moments.

At AppDynamics our Application Intelligence solution uncovers, tags, traces and learns the key business moments delivered by an app. We refer to business moments as Business Transactions. Importantly we automatically baseline the performance of these Business Transactions, from an end-to-end perspective, to detect emerging app issues, so that they don’t impact customer experience during key business moments