The role of the modern CIO is being reinvented, today’s CIOs must be aligned with business initiatives for productivity, growth and profit to be successful. This is in addition to core initiatives such as supporting the successful adoption and implementation of emerging technologies, driving continued improvements in operational efficiency and end user experience. It is for those reasons we believe CIOs will seek to achieve the following in 2015;

• Ensure IT effectiveness and business alignment. CIOs must align IT initiatives with desired business outcomes for productivity, growth and profit. APM historical performance reports provide the empirical data they ned to help them balance workloads, right-size the enterprise and eliminate cost overruns so capacity planning meets the business needs of today while preparing for the emerging technologies of tomorrow.

• Expand the use of KPI metrics. What started with call center, helpdesk and customer service metrics is expanding rapidly. APM solutions that can be adapted to collect KPIs for industry and role specific applications are influencing the decision making of CEOs, CFOs and other executives. APM solutions will be used to measure and determine the viability of pilot programs, industrial expansion and even the purchase of competing intellectual properties.

• Enable workspace flexibility. IT executives are being challenged to adopt and integrate mobile solutions at a blinding pace but 70 percent of end user devices cannot pass basic compliance and security tests, so introducing foreign devices on the corporate network poses serious risks. CIOs will need to ensure availability while managing access, device and user compliance and security, having universal insight across user and device profiles, approved and blacklisted apps, databases and domains will be critical to success.

• The borderless enterprise explosion will usher in a new era of compliance and security. The gaps and interdependencies between cloud, mobility, virtual and shared infrastructures, social media platforms and SaaS will inspire a renewed focus on compliance and security the way email, malware and network security have before. APM providers will be faced with some interesting choices; acquire or develop additional internal compliance and security expertise, partner with an existing security provider or remain focused on their existing silo niche. CIOs will be left with deciding to go all-in with a security provider,

• Deliver a positive user experience through enhanced service performance. End users judge their experience relative to their ability to be productive and complete an end goal. Whether end users are employees and partners seeking to work seamlessly between the office and a mobile device as they move across domains or customers accessing a web cart, they all expect apps and databases to be available, accessible and responsive. CIOs will rely heavily on APM solutions to provide KPI for user logons, average response time, page loads, app adoption, abandonment rates and other metrics to ensure that end users are happy and productive.

• Improve operational efficiency. Reliance on command line interfaces and technology trees is functional but outdated. CIOs will arm and empower IT managers, admins and specialists with APM solutions that are customizable, intuitive, integrate easily with existing NOC tools and provide a unified view of the enterprise. The end goal will be to accelerate time to resolution, eliminate guesswork, reduce dependency on multiple silo-centric tools with limited visibility and mitigate the impact that natural attrition has on tribal knowledge.

For CIOs to achieve these goals they will need universal insight across the enterprise and timely, correlated information that enables data driven decision making. 2015 will be a very interesting year as CIO thought leaders seek to improve the end user experience and enhance productivity within the enterprise.

About the Author: Srinivas Ramanathan is CEO and founder of eG Innovations. Prior to eG Innovations, he was a senior research scientist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California. Srinivas has extensive experience in Internet technologies, performance monitoring and management, and multimedia systems. He has co-authored more than forty technical papers and has been a co-inventor of 14 US patents. Srinivas has a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California, San Diego and a Masters in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India.