Sector-specific APM Expands Rapidly as Bank IT Spending Surges

Application Performance Monitoring (APM (News - Alert)) specialist ITRS Group Ltd. is expecting bigger growth this year as the world’s financial community prepares to proactively manage the performance, health and capacity of trading infrastructure from an end-to-end business perspective. For that, they need an APM solution that is specific to their needs.

“A monitoring solution which fails to analyze and model the business users’ experience of the trading infrastructure performance is ultimately blind at the point of contact between IT and the business,” said ITRS in a report posted on bobsguide.com site.

For these institutions to comply with regulations efficiently there must be investment in automation and therefore technology, according to ITRS. But, to justify the necessary increases in IT budgets, there must also be a demonstrable increase in the ROI, added ITRS. The company believes that financial institutions will only be able to measure the ROI via specialized, end-to-end APM solutions. This conclusion is drawn from a report by market research firm Gartner (News - Alert).

In this Gartner report, written by Will Cappelli, Research VP, and Jonah Kowall, Research Director, the authors discuss the exponential growth in worldwide spending on APM. A comment by co-author Kowall was posted on bobsguide.com site.

It said, “With the high demand for Application Performance Monitoring we are seeing additional market opportunities for vendors to focus on specific industry verticals. While many vendors market solutions towards those buyers, there are specific solutions designed from the ground up for those industries.”

As per the post on bobsguide.com, ITRS, which has clients across US, Europe and Asia, was evaluated as an ‘APM innovator’ by this Gartner report. ITRS believes that it was selected because the company focuses on meeting the specific needs of the financial markets, in comparison with other technology providers. And the company is hoping to benefit from the huge growth in spending on APM since 2009.

This greater awareness and acceptance of sector-specific APM is also reflected in recent research from Celent on IT spending in Banking, as per the bobsguide.com report. Celent expects global IT spending in banking to be around US $173.3 billion in 2012.

Celent’s senior analyst Jacob Jehger forecasts that in the Asia-Pacific region corporate bank IT spending is set to increase by 6 percent to US $59.4 billion in 2012 alone and that regulatory expenditure will continue to grow in North America. Likewise, the analyst is expecting IT expenditure in European banks to be around US $59.5 billion during 2013, contributing to a 3.4 percent global increase in 2014. 

Bobsguide.com report quoted Kevin Covington, ITRS CEO, as saying, “Being named an APM innovator for the financial markets in Gartner’s report is of great significance to us. ITRS will continue to lead in the innovation and support for specialized solutions for the financial, trading and risk management industry. The next few years will see institutions having to address a number of regulatory market needs; of course, our clients realize compliance is not optional, but the real challenge is understanding how best to address these requirements.”