Applications – or apps – have become integral to how we communicate, consume content and work. Apps run in our mobile and desktop operating environments, in the cloud, appliances and other hardware. They are also key to how major industries, such as the financial services industry, are managing their internal and consumer-facing operations.

However, as apps grow in capability and, as a result, complexity, they have become difficult to consistently maintain in terms of security and bug-fixes. For example, imagine a banking app that crashes in the middle of a wireless payment.

A bug is bad enough, but it’s worse if your internal IT team has a backlog of tasks and are unable to quickly issue a bug-fix. In the worst case scenario, this can put your entire business at risk, in a best-case scenario, it can consume valuable IT resources and drain operating budgets.

This is where relying on Application Management Services (AMS) is a sound business decision.

AMS is basically outsourcing the task of providing ongoing support for your apps to an external provider that specializes in this type of maintenance and monitoring. Through AMS, you can delegate the responsibility of monitoring and releasing patches, bug-fixes and minor enhancements to another company.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a small company or a large enterprise, leveraging AMS will enable you to improve internal efficiency, increase user-satisfaction and free your internal IT team to focus on moving forward instead of constantly returning to existing – or outgoing – technology.

 

How Large Enterprises Can Benefit from Application Management Services

From customer relationship management (CRM) systems, content management systems (CMS), enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to business intelligence (BI) and others, apps are a mainstay, driving countless functions within large businesses.

However, as the number of apps – and the complexity of each app – expands, it has become difficult for internal IT teams to manage their backlogs. In fact, Gartner had learned that these internal backlogs were slowing enterprise app adoption because IT teams were concerned of how support would cut into their budgets and increase backlogs.

Enterprises can prevent these backlogs – and the user-dissatisfaction, interruptions and other inefficiencies those backlogs caused – by outsourcing the monitoring, management, bug-fixing and optimization tasks for those apps to an AMS provider.

In fact, even if fiscal resources were not a constraint, there’s a cost in terms of time and your backlog if you lose an in-house employee critical to app maintenance. Not only will you lose a critical member and increase your backlog, but there’s a cost to recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training. Especially considering how niche some of the skills are to maintain specific applications and databases.

An AMS provider mitigates that risk by ensuring that you can still maintain your apps in the event of an employee leaving. AMS providers have full-time teams comprising of skilled experts – from database analysts and SQL programmers to software developers – competent in the industry’s leading tools, languages and systems to thoroughly understand how your apps were built and to properly maintain them. Even custom business apps can be supported.

AMS providers will free your internal teams to focus on more pressing projects while ensuring that your company’s functions (via apps) operate as intended.

Photo by Gustas Brazaitis

Why SMBs Must Use Application Management Services

The leading constraint for small and medium businesses (SMB) is the lack of resources, which also translates into very limited internal IT resources. However, apps are essential for SMBs as well, especially as a means to offset their lack of human resources and physical infrastructure.

So it’s vital that these apps function as expected and not be the cause for an interruption in work or loss of customers. Relying on an AMS provider to maintain your apps frees you from the overhead of a full-time IT team support. Your return-on-investment (ROI) would stem from the cost-savings of not burdening full-time staff for support.

It can be very difficult to find the right database and application management skills needed to manage your core business applications all in one person. With AMS, you can turn to a team with individuals who are each specialized in a different suite of apps, programming languages and have the database expertise to manage your applications. Then you can scale up or down this service as needed so you’re never paying for more than you need or short of resources.

How Consumer Apps Benefit from Application Management Services

The consumer app marketplace is very competitive. Not only do you need to maintain the trust of your users by meeting their expectations in terms of reliability, but you must also constantly iterate and improve your app to stay ahead of your competitors. In many cases, your app could be tied to core business (such as banking) or be the business in and of itself.

You can augment your internal IT team with an AMS provider to ensure that your consumer app is functioning correctly and, in case of a bug, that it’s fixed in short order. An AMS provider will also ensure that your app stays up-to-date with the operating system. AMS is also scalable in that you can adjust to sudden increases in demand without full-time hiring; in case of a drop-off, you can simply reduce your AMS usage instead of absorbing the cost of more full-time staff.

 

Your Competitors are Already Using AMS

(Image Source:  Grand View Research, 2017)

In 2017, Grand View Research estimated that the AMS market could hit $87.6 billion by 2025. The healthcare and financial services industries are driving demand, which isn’t surprising as apps are at the core of their respective internal and customer-facing functions. They’re using AMS to properly maintain a healthy app suite to avoid significant interruption in their activities.

Resolute Technology Solutions offers a complete application management services (AMS) package for monitoring, optimizing, fixing and supporting your applications. Contact us to learn how we can increasing your business’ efficiency while lowering your operating costs.

 

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