The end of a year always raises the same question—what’s next? We imagine all the new possibilities and opportunities 2020 will bring. We get so excited about what's ahead, we tend to forget the amount of change that happened in the year we're leaving behind. For example, 2019 brought us further into a hybrid IT reality that looks more distributed and complex than ever before. It gave us increased innovation around AI in IT, and marked the year AWS officially tackled the enterprise. All of these are important indicators of what’s to come, so it’s critical they remain in sight and not in our rearview mirror. Let me explain further:
High Demand for APM Tool Adoption
Companies are increasingly adopting more than one platform—either for financial leverage or to create a time-to-market or feature “race” between the platforms. Multi-cloud strategies are here to stay and, to remain competitive, public cloud providers must offer unique features or capabilities. This has created an upsurge in new and more complex technologies, increasing the need for application performance management tool adoption. The year 2020 will bring an ever-increasing demand for
APM tools and services.
APM Skills in a Cloud-First World
APM skills continue to be among the top skills tech pros want to develop in the coming year, according to the recent SolarWinds
® IT Pro Day survey,
Building Confidence for Tech Pros of Tomorrow. However, in 2020 tech pros will begin to recognize that many of the skills they
already possess are sufficient to manage the new realm of integrated solutions in the cloud. Tech pros can leverage some of the same skills they could before. So while the nouns have changed—e.g. we used to have “server” or “virtual machine,” now we have “containers”—the verbs remain focused on optimizing performance, ensuring availability, and planning capacity. In 2020, the extent to which tech pros will discover they don’t need to fear new nouns (more than they did when they moved from client virtualization) will increase.
In Conclusion
Confidence was a big topic in 2019—the lack of it in certain areas and the need for it in others. Tech pros realized they have the necessary skills to succeed, but lack of confidence was building a wall and creating new challenges. The demand for APM tools is no surprise either, since multi-cloud strategies are more necessary than ever before.
2019 brought some of the most incredible changes, which makes it hard to say goodbye. The good thing is we don't have to. Some of the big trends and moments that defined 2019 will be here when we cross the line to 2020—just better and stronger.
