Dynatrace Perform 2017 Conference: Ready to Rally APM Partners, Customers

More than 2,000 partners and customers are set to attend Dynatrace Perform 2017 next week in Las Vegas. The gathering comes at a key time for Dynatrace and the overall application performance monitoring (APM) market.

Customers and IT services providers are embracing APM to monitor and optimize cloud, Web, on-premises and mobile applications. The overall goal: Maximize the end-user/customer experience. Traditional APM tools certainly help those efforts. But it's time for the next big market leap, Dynatrace asserts.

"IT complexity has reached a new saturation point," the company states in a Perform 2017 preview. "Companies must now find new AI strategies for automating application performance monitoring – physically eyeballing charts and error alerts is no longer viable. Private, public and hybrid cloud environments plus the pressure to release software faster, without impacting the customer experience, all makes for a very difficult task."

APM Rivalries

In recent days, most eyes have been on APM rival AppDynamics, which Cisco Systems is acquiring for $3.7 billion. Additional rivals also are making moves. New Relic, for one, is extending from APM down to infrastructure monitoring. And DataDog is extending from infrastructure monitoring up to APM.

Of course, Dynatrace also has been on the move. Pushing beyond the APM moniker, Dynatrace has focused heavily on "digital experience" outcomes for customers. At the same time, the company has expanded its monitoring capabilities to support Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Amazon Web Services, OpenStack. More recently, the AWS relationship hit additional milestones involving the AWS Marketplace and DevOps.

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So what's missing? Yes, Dynatrace has a partner program. And Dynatrace offers its own managed services to enterprise customers. But I'd like to see a more formalized MSP partner effort -- especially since so many MSPs are now seeking to monitor, manage and optimize customer applications.

Overall, I sense that Dynatrace remains in growth mode but it's difficult to pinpoint the privately held company's actual size. Dynatrace split from Compuware in 2014. At the time, the APM provider was expecting to see an 11 to 13 percent increase in revenues between 2014 and 2016, to $420.1 million, according to The Detroit News.

We'll be sure to share partner and customer updates that emerge from Dynatrace Perform.