In many contexts, the phrase digital disruption is nothing but management consulting doublespeak, but for digital performance management vendor Dynatrace, it is both a customer challenge as well as a driver of the company’s own innovation.
Dynatrace is the application performance management (APM) leader, with revenues of $425 million and over 7,500 customers worldwide – only now they refer to their product category as digital performance management, as digital is transforming the APM landscape.
At last week’s PERFORM 2015 conference, Dynatrace executives laid out the digital disruptions many of their customers are struggling with.
The common theme is exploding complexity as diverse technology trends drive change in enterprises, including the fragmentation of mobile device technologies, the rise of microservices, the growth of application programming interfaces (APIs) and the explosion of digital touchpoints, from smartphones to the Internet of Things.
On top of all these trends is the fact that every enterprise is now hosting hundreds of separate web sites and customer-facing applications, each of which includes a multitude of third-party plugins. “The technology story can be esoteric at times,” explains John Van Siclen, CEO of Dynatrace, “but the value proposition can be transformational.”
How customers interact with big companies is also undergoing a dramatic shift, as they are moving to self-service models, including hotels, banks, airlines, as well as how enterprises serve their own employees. The burning question for Dynatrace: “How do people actually manage these things?” according to Van Siclen.
After Thoma Bravo bought the company last year, taking it private and splitting it off from mainframe tools vendor Compuware, Dynatrace was able to double-down on the product innovation it felt was necessary to compete in this environment of digital disruption – even though such innovation would itself be disruptive to Dynatrace’s established business model. In other words, Dynatrace faced the classic Innovator’s Dilemma.
In the years since Clayton Christiansen’s book, the Innovator’s Dilemma is now a familiar challenge: incumbent companies with established customers are loathe to invest in innovations that might disrupt existing revenue streams – thus eventually ceding leadership to more nimble challengers.
To avoid this fate, Dynatrace has been investing time and resources into Ruxit, a cutting-edge performance monitoring tool. Yet while the Ruxit product itself is unquestionably innovative, so too is Dynatrace’s business strategy.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/10/20/digital-disruption-drives-innovation-for-dynatrace/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, AppDynamics, Compuware, and Dynatrace are Intellyx customers. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Dynatrace covered Jason Bloomberg’s travel expenses to the PERFORM Conference, a standard industry practice. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.
