Even 60 minutes of troubleshooting time for app issues is often too much to ask of IT departments, according to research from a firm that develops IT management software.
The study on app availability and performance was conducted by SolarWinds on a focus group of Australian businesses and a combined total of 201 business apps the organizations use.
While approximately 68 percent of the surveyed users expected their IT departments to resolve app issues in under an hour, just about a third of that group's tech support sectors could stay within the 60-minute window, according to a press release from SolarWinds. Around 85 percent of the survey's respondents stated they contacted tech support about their respective organizations' apps at least once in the last year and 25 percent of that group had to reach out for help with their apps at least six times over a 12-month period.
Apps have quickly emerged as a vital component to the operations of businesses. Suaad Sait, SolarWinds' executive vice president for products and markets, goes as far as calling apps the "heart of business" and said app performance was the "lifeblood of success."
"The resulting importance of application performance and availability requires IT to expand beyond infrastructure-centric management to add app-centric management," said Sait. "Beginning now and increasingly so in the future, this will make or break businesses."
SolarWinds attributed the rise in importance of apps to the bring your own device (BYOD) phenomenon, the connectedness brought on by cloud platforms and the continual rise of systems as a service (SaaS). While custom applications have been around for decades, Sait said the findings in SolarWinds' study proves just how vital end-user experiences of software have become to the sustained success of businesses.
"End users expect applications to work and work well," said Sait. "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."
While SolarWinds has released some disconcerting figures on the struggle of businesses to support apps, Sprint has released an initiative it calls Google Apps for Business to help businesses roll out new apps. The wireless carrier has also offered to train the businesses on the apps and provide tech support for the software. The move is part of the company's bid to attract new customers. It wants to become a "one-stop mobile service shop for businesses" by integrating much of Google's cloud-based technology and making it easily accessible with a single registration.
