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App Experience Analytics: The MSP’s Strategic Digital Transformation Play

Across your customer base, there’s a widespread, compelling need for digital business transformation. However, as your customers set out to pursue their transformation initiatives, many are encountering significant challenges. Application experience analytics services are emerging as a strategic way for MSPs to help customers address critical challenges and accelerate their digital business transformation. Read on to learn more about the demand for these services and the opportunities they present to your business.

The Criticality of User Experience

CA’s Ken Vanderweel
Author: Ken Vanderweel

Today, software innovation is what’s fueling business innovation. In every sector, software innovation will continue to accelerate, disrupting markets and competitive landscapes with increasing rapidity. Moving forward, the companies that thrive will be those that deliver innovative applications with increasing scale, speed and quality. To meet these objectives, organizations will need to embark on a fundamental digital business transformation. This market imperative is what’s driving a lot of investment today.

Ultimately, the success of digital transformation and market innovation will be defined by one key aspect: user experience. Each digital interaction offers a business the chance to delight a customer—or lose one. Businesses have to deliver a positive experience and satisfy a user community accustomed to intuitive, fast, engaging and stable applications. Users are increasingly unforgiving when their expectations aren’t met, and the damage of a single negative user experience can quickly escalate as user rankings drop and critical comments are disseminated.

In this user-centric environment, application experience analytics capabilities are in urgent demand. As issues arise, analytics are essential in rapidly determining whether design, code or infrastructure are contributing factors. These insights, along with the ability to track the buyer’s journey and identify how, when and where customers use an application, are strategic enablers for businesses looking to deliver an optimized experience across web, mobile and wearable applications.

Analytics Challenges

For enterprises, the stakes for managing the user experience are high. However, many organizations are struggling with establishing the capabilities needed to accurately understand the user experience. Following are a few of the issues that make it difficult to establish application experience analytics:

  • Complex application portfolios. To serve today’s consumers, businesses need to deliver applications on web browsers, multiple mobile device platforms and, increasingly, wearable devices. For each platform, a business may need to support multiple operating systems and releases. To support DevOps, user experience monitoring is increasingly vital throughout the software development lifecycle, which further increases the time and complexity associated with managing analytics efforts.
  • Large upfront and ongoing infrastructure investment. To establish the application experience analytics capabilities required, organizations need to evaluate, procure, configure and deploy the necessary hardware and software and maintain these systems over time.
  • Massive event volumes. Today’s hybrid IT environments generate a massive volume of event data, making it difficult to sift through disparate reports, spot and track trends and prioritize efforts. These challenges only grow more difficult as the number of users, applications and devices continue to come online in an enterprise.
  • Myriad toolsets. To support a range of application types, different analytics tools may need to be procured, deployed and maintained.
  • Lack of internal expertise. Acquiring the internal expertise required to establish and maintain sophisticated application experience analytics can be a challenge. As technological advances and innovations continue to come at a faster pace, it can be difficult for internal staff to keep up, especially given the breadth of responsibilities they have to contend with.

These barriers continue to plague internal teams as they seek to manage analytics across their organization’s proliferating applications and releases. While these challenges are significant, so are the risks of not employing application experience analytics. Without the visibility these analytics provide, organizations are flying blind, which leaves them exposed to poor user ratings, brand damage, eroding market share and lost revenues. By helping customers address these challenges, MSPs can capitalize on a significant market opportunity.

Application Experience Analytics Services: The Business Imperative for Service Providers

Traditional, infrastructure-centric managed services have become highly competitive and increasingly commoditized. At the same time, in the application economy, customers are increasingly focused on digital transformation and the application experience.

Get the White Paper: MSPs and User Experience

In response, service provider executives are exploring strategies for adapting their service portfolios to these new priorities. While the need to deliver strategic digital transformation services is clear, executives may struggle with determining the steps required to make this a reality.

Application experience analytics services can represent an ideal starting point for many different types of service providers. By helping customers optimize the experience their applications deliver, these services can offer invaluable assistance with accelerating digital business transformation.

Delivering these higher-level, higher-value services allows MSPs to align with customers’ emerging priorities, and stay relevant to their businesses over the long term. These services also help MSPs to leverage their expertise, expand out of highly commoditized markets and address a critical market demand. Quite simply, MSPs can gain market share by delivering analytics services—or risk losing market share to those that do.

How Customers Benefit

By delivering comprehensive application experience analytics services, MSPs can offer the following benefits to customers:

  • Realize fast time to value. Help your customers start leveraging sophisticated application experience analytics fast, so they can quickly harness its benefits in their business.
  • Improve service levels. These services help customers triage and fix performance issues faster by segmenting performance and analytics by various dimensions, including network/carrier, location, operating system and device type.
  • Enhance cost efficiency and predictability. Through advanced analytics, customers can reduce costs by minimizing the frequency and duration of outages—and all the efforts associated with triage and emergency calls.
  • Boost revenue retention. Analytics provide the visibility that’s essential to delivering a seamless customer experience across channels. By improving user experiences, your customers will reduce the financial risks associated with negative user ratings.
  • Optimize business outcomes. Employing these insights to optimize the user journey, your customers can enhance offerings and services, retain and attract new customers, increase revenue, achieve faster resolution times and speed digital business transformation.
  • Strengthen staff’s strategic focus. Help your customers’ internal teams offload the effort associated with managing analytics implementation, maintenance and reporting—so they can focus on innovating applications and other strategic efforts.

Conclusion

Application experience analytics services represent a key way for many MSPs to support customers’ digital transformation and address an urgent market demand. By delivering these strategic services, MSPs can position their businesses for long-term growth.

CA has recently published a comprehensive guide that details the opportunities these analytics services offer MSPs—and how they can capitalize. This guide provides a detailed look at the market dynamics that are creating widespread demand for application experience analytics, drawing on an extensive market survey. The document details the requirements analytics services should address, specific service offerings that can be delivered and the approaches different types of service providers can take as they move into this market.

Bonus: To learn more, download this guide: “Application Experience Analytics Services: The Emerging Market Demands and How Service Providers Can Address Them.”


Ken Vanderweel is senior director of service provider solutions marketing at CA Technologies. Read more CA blogs here.