Australian IT Pros Face Heightened Employee Expectations on Application Performance and Availability, SolarWinds Survey Reveals

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA–(Marketwired – Aug 13, 2014) – SolarWinds ( NYSE : SWI ), a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, today announced new Australian findings which showed that while applications are now the heart of businesses of all sizes, IT is struggling to ensure their availability and performance. The SolarWinds report found that 68 percent of employees expect IT to solve an application performance or availability issue in sixty minutes or less, yet only one-third of users said IT could meet this demand.

Thanks to the proliferation of BYOD, cloud, SaaS and consumer technologies in the workplace, applications have become the disruptive technology that will drive business IT well into the future. In fact, 94 percent of employees said application performance and availability affect their ability to do their job, with over half (53 percent) reporting that it is absolutely critical. At the same time, the application delivery chain or application stack — the application, software, middleware and extended infrastructure required for performance — is becoming more complex to support, identify and resolve issues as applications become more networked, virtualisation drives IT infrastructure convergence and abstraction, and end users become even more mobile.

“The application is the heart of business and its performance is the lifeblood of success,” said Suaad Sait, executive vice president, products and markets, SolarWinds. “The resulting importance of application performance and availability requires IT to expand beyond infrastructure-centric management to add app-centric management. Beginning now and increasingly so in the future, this will make or break businesses.”

Despite the rise of applications as king of business delivery, applications and some form of management tools to support them have been in general business use for decades. However, the struggle for IT to ensure performance and availability of business-critical applications remains. To illustrate, 85 percent of respondents said they contacted their IT department in the past year due to an application performance or availability issue, with one-third having done so six times or more.

“The findings show that quality of the end user application experience is critical for success. End users expect applications to work and work well. When application performance or availability issues do arise, end users expect a quick response time to problem resolution from IT, down to just minutes in some cases. For IT Pros, it’s no longer good enough for an application to work, but it will also need to work to end user expectations. Ultimately, IT will be held responsible for application performance, regardless of whether the application resides on premise or in the cloud,” said Sait.”

The survey also found that applications such as Microsoft® Exchange™, SharePoint®, NetSuite® and others, are now at the core of nearly all business-critical functions and beyond.

SolarWinds conducted the study to understand the impact of application performance and availability on Australian employees, and their experiences with and expectations of IT when problems arise. The survey yielded responses from 201 Australian business application end users currently employed full time in an office environment — public and private sector small, mid-size and enterprise companies.

Additional Resources

• Blog Post: 1,800 Global End Users Say Apps More Important than Ever, but IT’s Challenge of Managing Performance Remains
• SlideShare: Application Performance End User Survey (Australia)
• News Release: SolarWinds Asks: “Can You Tell Which System Issue Will Affect Your Application Performance?” You Should

About SolarWinds
SolarWinds ( NYSE : SWI ) provides powerful and affordable IT management software to customers worldwide from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses. In all of our market areas, our approach is consistent. We focus exclusively on IT Pros and strive to eliminate the complexity that they have been forced to accept from traditional enterprise software vendors. SolarWinds delivers on this commitment with unexpected simplicity through products that are easy to find, buy, use and maintain while providing the power to address any IT management problem on any scale. Our solutions are rooted in our deep connection to our user base, which interacts in our thwack® online community to solve problems, share technology and best practices, and directly participate in our product development process. Learn more today at http://www.solarwinds.com/.

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