The growing importance of reliable applications in the enterprise has opened a lucrative market opportunity for application performance management vendors, some of which have taken full advantage lately.

As end users bring their own devices to work, download apps and sign up for cloud services, it's getting harder for IT to maintain application visibility and control performance. In addition to introducing IT management blind spots, trends such as consumeristion, mobility and cloud computings are also increasing business risk, according to a survey of CIOs from around the world.

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.

The founder and CEO of an application performance management (APM) software vendor said that today's IT development and production environments are not adequately served by what he terms "APM 1.0."