What Makes Application Performance Monitoring Powerful for Airlines

Enterprises worldwide are renovating their business offerings to adopt digital transformation. Airlines, for instance, are leveraging application performance monitoring to simplify the complexity behind directing a digital transformation, and are in a constant endeavor to ensure that they meet the requirements of digitally invested customers, through a multiple-channel approach.

Faster time-to-market and customer experience are among the key contemplations for digital transformation initiatives, more so for the aviation industry. Digital transformation demands high speed delivery, real-time business monitoring and new-age QA adoptions. As a result, there is a clear shift in the mind of both businesses and IT operations, throughout the globe.

The recently released IDG Market Pulse Study on digital transformation defines different meanings of digital transformation in different organizations. The IDG Market Pulse survey asked the 500+ director-level enterprise IT managers what they saw as the desired outcome of their digital transformation. Starting a digital transformation essentially means higher efficiency at quicker speed, enhancing of customer experience, and an increased level of security.

Quality Engineering and the Aviation Industry

Software quality has gone through a metamorphosis, mainly due to evolving customer expectations and dynamic business environments. Customers now expect addition of business value, rather than the mere augmentation of execution capacity. Involving complex technologies has put forth the need for partnership-driven outsourcing engagements. Industry-leading QA processes, delivery excellence, business flexibility, ownership of outcomes, and cost efficiency have arisen as the key pillars for competitive differentiation.

Airlines have plenty of transactional data pertaining to customers; leveraging the data to derive insights is now their priority. The options for data storage are gradually getting better, and airlines now, more than ever, can store and analyze vast amounts of customer data. The data can be used to create relevant offers and personalize customer journey. Airlines have several touch points that can be effectively used to make commercial offers, whether it is by cross-selling products, or operational offers. Airlines can determine the selection and timing of such offers by accurately analyzing the various factors that they have, by the virtue of reliable real-time insights into a passenger’s travel information.

Application Performance Monitoring

Application performance monitoring (APM), is an industry-wide recognized term used for monitoring or managing the:

• Performance of written code
• Corresponding dependencies
• Time taken for transactions
• Overall user experience

Even something as forgivable as a tiny glitch in an application can send loyal app users and brand lovers packing. It is important to ensure that modern applications are simple and appealing to use, the inner-workings are filled with system complexities. It is precisely due to this reason, that application performance monitoring is essential to simplify all the complexity. Quickly and efficiently tackling these problems leads businesses to deliver remarkable user experience. Happy customers mean robust businesses.

Per Gartner, the APM market is one of the largest sub-segments of the IT operations management market, with 2015 revenue of approximately $2.7 billion and a growth rate exceeding 10% annually.

There is a continuing investment, as well as acquisitions, within the market. The role of Performance Engineering is crucial in today’s world, as poor performance of applications can drastically diminish profitability, send customer relationships for a toss, and result in the loss of a significant amount of revenue.

How Airlines Can Transform Their Businesses with APM

The Application Performance factor enhances the performance of several e-commerce portals, and increases overall productivity on a global scale, leveraging market-leading technology and integrating it intricately into data centers, airport locations and outstations. Application performance monitoring helps achieve optimal performance and faster adoption by customers.

Application performance especially helps airlines to:

• Expand routes
• Address strategic imperatives
• Reduce costs of customer service
• Provide a seamless passenger experience
• Ensure that the airline is abreast with modern technology

It is important for airlines to be connected via the e-commerce portal, as it improves company-wide productivity measures, and also sets up IT cost-saving processes, such as data center and server consolidation, without having to compromise on the performance for outstation users. Airlines are looked upon to be technological innovators, not just while during the flight, but also in the processes leading up to it and long after the journey is over. Web check-in, online ticket sales, and seat booking are among quite a few important facilities that airlines are expected to offer, using technology.

The sheer volume of devices and the existence of several tiers translates into a gigantic number of moving parts. Statistically, there is a danger of complexities at this level complexity to result in a constant catastrophe. Airlines can simply not afford to be laid-back and risk underperformance, owing mainly to the intense competition in the industry. There is always scope for better IT performance of the airline, as each application can be treated as an integrated whole. It is important to constantly monitor all transactions across all the tiers, even for something as simple as the process of a customer buying an airline ticket.

Load testing can help gauge crucial parameters, such as the anticipated website traffic. It gives a realistic view about whether the website can handle such numbers, and prevents airlines from issues as severe as bankruptcy, owing to the overlooking of few estimations. APM ensures that servers are fully functional and remain upright, and provides the true capacity of the IT systems. A leading European airlines was recently in the news, as it averted disaster through the usage of application performance monitoring software, in its endeavor to expand its routes to cover North America.

In Conclusion

Airlines are quickly becoming aware of the pressing need to be consistently high performing, and have applications available round-the-clock, to ensure business performance in the digital economy. An exhaustive Performance Engineering strategy that utilizes APM solution will become a key enabler for digital success.

Airlines can transform their businesses by Quality Engineering, Performance Engineering and leveraging APM solutions. Performance Engineering will utilize the APM tools effectively, to:

• Assess the performance of individual as well as inter-connected applications
• Identify crucial bottlenecks well ahead of time
• Allow QA engineers to effectively fix identified performance issues

If you are attending Aviation Festival Americas, listen to Cigniti Thought Leader, Sai Chintala, President – Global Delivery & Solution Engineering talking about ‘Leverage Quality Engineering and Sentiment Analysis – Increase your airline customer satisfaction index’.

You can also register for the Aviation Festival event. To know further, write to us at contact@cigniti.com.