End User Experience Monitoring Software Market Update, Q1 2008

The end user experience monitoring market has traditionally served two masters: the Web business marketing side, mainly concerned with client satisfaction, and the IT operations area, which mostly focuses on application performance and service delivery. One particular focus of the IT operations side of the market has been incident and problem management, especially when combined with an application performance management (APM) solution. As customer-facing applications focus heavily on J2EE and .NET, the market now tends to favor server-side passive technologies that can provide more detailed information about application errors, performance problems, and user behavior. This, however, does not preclude a re-emergence of desktop-based passive agents, especially when looking at Citrix- or Microsoft RDP-based applications. As vendors focused their own technological "comfort zone" on either the business or on IT operations, many users face a situation in which they need to deploy two or more solutions to serve all constituencies. New announcements show that while this submarket separation is still largely the case, bridging solutions may be on the horizon.