AppDynamics announces Business iQ updates, IoT and network visibility
AppDynamics on Wednesday is announcing a series of updated and new offerings, with the aim of giving CIOs the tools to contribute more to strategic business decisions.
"As CIOs get organizations to become more progressive and more agile, what they're looking for is a different kind of leadership," said Prathap Dendi, GM of Business iQ at AppDynamics, to ZDNet. They're looking beyond the bottom line, he said, and want to be "at the table... looking at what is the top line impact IT can have for the enterprise."
The updates include the next generation of Business iQ, the platform AppDynamics introduced last year to show how IT performance impacts business performance. Additionally, the Cisco-owned company is taking the wraps off new Internet of Things and network visibility, as well as a new machine learning-powered tool to help surface the root cause of application performance problems.
Already, just about a year after its launch, more than 80 percent of AppDynamics customers are using Business iQ, Dendi said. Correlating application functionality with actual business outcomes is increasingly important, he said, as "business models are increasingly software driven."
The upcoming version of Business iQ -- which will be previewed at the AppD Summit in New York this week -- will include a new feature called Business Journeys, which enables companies to link and visually analyze different customer actions, creating a map of a single customer "journey." It provides a single view of how a customer interacts with a business, in real time across any device.
The updated version of Business iQ also comes with a tool called "experience level management" (XLM), which enables businesses to create custom experiences for certain segments of customers. For example, the CIO of a retail store could create tailored experiences for top customers by setting unique performance thresholds across the store's websites, mobile apps, in-store wireless and at the checkout register.
As for IoT visibility, Dendi said the new capabilities eliminate the "black boxes" that obscure device functionality and user habits. "Our customers can see everything from the first click to the middle men, all the way back to the server room and back to users," he said.
New network visibility similarly helps AppDynamics customers track latency issues at the network level and understand the business ramifications.
Meanwhile, the latest update of App iQ includes a new tool called KPI (Key Performance Indicator) analyzer, which uses machine learning to automate the analysis of application performance. It helps customers identify the likely root causes of poor performance and determine the likely impact those performance issues will have on the KPI for each metric.