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Crittercism surveyed enterprise leaders, ranging from CTOs and CIOs to Mobile Operations Managers to understand their sentiments about mobility in the enterprise.  This report will provide key insights into the top challenges developers and enterprises face and identify their highest priority mobile objectives for the next 6-12 months.

There is no doubt that the mobile landscape is changing rapidly, as is the velocity in which organizations are adopting new mobile technologies.  Because of the positive disruption that mobile has and will continue to have, it could be argued that the momentum of the mobile space is higher than what we have experienced in any technology development.  With new technologies with unprecedented capabilities however, come new challenges that organizations will inevitably face.  Our research further validates this statement, with 100% of our respondents indicating that they anticipate more complexity in mobile application development in the next 6-12 months.  That is why we have developed an Error Monitoring platform to help developers and enterprises gain visibility into the performance of their mobile apps.  Read more.

The implications of added complexity in mobile application development are vast.  First, there is a need for organizations to understand the types of apps they will create, whether they are B2B, B2C, or B2E, how they will create the app (resource requirements), and once the app is created, how they will manage the performance of their mobile applications.  Though our survey results indicate that the majority of organizations are interested in building a consumer-facing app in the next 6-12 months, there is still quite a bit of interest in serving other segments.  Second, organizations will need to understand how to scale their mobile app operations.  Finally, organizations will need to identify ways in which they will be able to optimize their mobile applications and modify them to fit their business needs.

Our survey results indicate that many organizations express different challenges when managing their mobile applications, but detecting and diagnosing performance problems to maintain quality mobile apps remains the top challenge enterprises face.  In fact, 55% of our respondents indicate that pinpointing issues with their mobile applications remains a top challenge.  Drilling down further, we see that 40% of our respondents also indicate that performance issues resulting in negative app store reviews, frequent crashes, and users complaining about performance issues are their top challenges.

It is no small feat to manage application performance in an organization.  Gartner Research Vice Presidents Jonah Kowall and Will Cappelli recognize that ”The need for APM by IT operations, application support, development, quality assurance and line-of-business buyers is driven by increases in application complexity and the challenge of quality delivery in agile and cloud environments. 2013 will bring offerings in mobile and software as a service.”  Our own research indicates that the challenges will only become bigger and become more complex in the foreseeable future.

Crittercism is the world’s first mobile application performance management (APM) solution and sits at the center of the global shift to the new app economy. Crittercism products monitor every aspect of mobile app performance, allowing Developers and IT Operations to deliver high performing, highly reliable, highly available mobile apps. Crittercism offers a real-time global view of app diagnostics and app crashes across iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, Hybrid and HTML5 apps used on more than 500 million unique devices and in more than 50 billion app sessions. The company’s investors include Google Ventures, Opus Capital and Shasta Ventures.

Crittercism’s Top Tips for Optimizing Your Mobile App Strategy

More and more businesses are contemplating rolling out their own dedicated app, either within their business to improve productivity or customer facing to enhance sales or loyalty. Regardless of the motive, mobile can empower an enterprise and its workforce. But before you create your own dedicated app, there are a number of considerations that a business line manager or app operations team should take into consideration. We’ve outlined 5 points below to consider when rolling out a mobile app commercially or across your organization.

1.  Make an Orgnization-wide plan – A good rule of thumb is to create a strategy that includes teams across your organization including architecture, process, talent, tools and technology. App operations teams should discuss all options together, for example platforms, cloud computing and mobile to name a few. This in turn helps to streamline the process and create a more reliable roadmap.  Included in this plan should also be a clear direction of what type of app will be created (native, hybrid, or HTML5).  A great resource for defining what your business may need can be accessed here.  Also read more from Gartner.

2. Gain buy-in from Management – Now that you’ve got your plan you need to get the green light. For example, with a customer facing app, you will want to highlight to decision makers the value that your customers will be getting and how this will in turn help to build customer loyalty and drive sales. For example, a Walgreens app might send push notifications and top tips on how to prepare for the flu season rather than just advertisements for their own branded remedies.  Furthermore, for internal facing apps, app operations teams need to point out how the app will improve productivity within the business. So, demonstrating the business impact is key to getting the go ahead. However, at the end of day, the added value and sales or ROI needs to outweigh the investment.

3. Developing and deploying an app – With a whole slew of platforms and devices out there, it’s enough to make any app operations teams or organization tear its hair out. You can side step this headache by giving more thought to your intended user base. For example, if you will be primarily using mobile as a platform for workforce efficiency then iOS/iPad might be a top priority. However, if customer support is the goal, then perhaps Android is better given it has wider reach. Also, when deploying, be sure to make time for initial user testing and the Apple and Google app approval process, so be sure to build enough contingency into your roadmap. Once you take into account these items you will be well on your way to rolling out your app.  Access background information regarding the different platforms here.

4. Maintaining and optimizing your app – Just like the launch itself, maintenance and optimization of your application is crucial. Without proper maintenance it will fall into disrepair, and improvements are a must to develop user loyalty and repeat usage. In general, end users appreciate even the most minor enhancements. By building in a maintenance and regular monitoring plan early and prioritizing updates afterward, you can keep your maintenance costs down, while keeping your customers satisfied.

5. Constant communication – It will be important to keep an ongoing dialogue with your users for future app upgrades and new features. Receiving real time feedback will ensure you always know how your app is performing and help you quickly solve any problems that arise, so you can keep customers happy. Sometimes, the smallest wins show users you care about their feedback, building trust that you will continue to do so.  Access additional information here.

Regardless of the industry, organizations have recognized the critical role mobile apps play within their own business and with customers. With a good plan and the right tools, your business can end up looking like the smartest shop on the block. However, with new protocols, interfaces and ways of doing business constantly emerging, developing and optimizing your app can be challenging – that’s why we’re here to help. At Crittercism, we’re in the business of app optimization, so we know how to help businesses seamlessly integrate more robust mobile solutions to their platform, while ensuring success.

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Great news! Crittercism is featured in Gartner’s latest APM Report – Cool Vendors in APM! READ OUR PRESS RELEASE

Here’s a snippet from the report, download the full version HERE.

Why Cool: With the massive growth of native mobile applications, there are issues with platform diversity, code quality and performance of these applications. Crittercism helps by performing crash monitoring, analysis and application launch tracking. Having raised $18.7 million in funding during the past two years, the vendor is moving from monitoring application usage and behavior toward facilitating the mobile operations team, to understand and troubleshoot usage and performance of mobile applications. Crittercism was founded in 2010 by several computer science students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Johns Hopkins University, and a talented designer from MIT’s architecture program. The vendor has built a product that is relied on by a large number of mobile application providers. In order to use the service, the application must be instrumented using the software development kits (SDKs) that currently support Android, iOS, Windows Phone 8 and generic HTML5 applications. Once compiled into the application, mobile device information about the performance, usage and stability of the application are tracked, in addition to data about the device itself. This data is sent to the Crittercism SaaS infrastructure, where it is processed and resulting alerts and reporting are displayed to the application provider. Current customers include a long list of high profile mobile application providers, including LinkedIn, Netflix, Shazam, Pinterest, Home Depot, Urban Outfitters and eBay. Crittercism and its technology are widely adopted and provide value to those struggling with the emerging mobile application market. The vendor’s pricing is based on the number of monthly active users of consumer facing apps, and the number of devices for employeefacing apps.

Challenges: Forging new ground in the mobile performance monitoring space while other APM companies are also moving in this direction will be difficult and highly competitive for Crittercism. Measurement based pricing becomes difficult to sustain, especially with a growing set of features and increased data being collected. This is more of an issue because Crittercism is currently using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its infrastructure versus a traditional data center, which would allow a lower operational cost.

Who Should Care: The current core target buyers are development organizations, application owners and application support organizations managing mobile applications. IT operations professionals should consider understanding and integrating mobile application operations groups, which normally exist in lineofbusiness groups or other application support groups. Getting ahead of technologies that will be moving to mainstream operations requires proactive thinking, and mobile APM products will help operationalize the current offshoot that mobile applications represent.

Cool Vendors in Application Performance Monitoring, 2013 15 April 2013 by Jonah Kowall & Will Cappelli

We highlight emerging APM offerings bought by multiple buyers, including IT operations, application support, development and lineofbusiness application owners. These offerings encompass an understanding of network performance, the Internet’s health and critical mobile application performance.

Key Findings:

+ The health of an application is not confined to views from the data center network alone, but also includes the Internet and mobile carrier networks.

+ Application performance monitoring (APM) as a service is evolving at a rapid pace versus APM offerings that are confined to onpremises deployment models only.

+ Analytics are intrinsic to evolving APM solutions, as the complexity and diversity of data collected requires not only sophisticated reporting, but also more sophisticated mathematical algorithms to provide the IT technician or lineofbusiness user with insight.

Crittercism is listed as one of the Top 10 Hot Tech Startups for April by CRN!

San Francisco-based Crittercism has developed a mobile application performance management system that gives IT managers a real-time view of application diagnostics data and information about application crashes for software running on iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8 mobile devices, as well as HTML5 and hybrid mobile applications. Founded in 2011 by CEO Andrew Levy, Crittercism raised $12 million in Series B funding last month, led by Google Ventures and participation from Shasta Ventures and Opus Capital. In January Crittercism scored a coup when it struck a deal to integrate its APM tools with Appcelerator’s Titanium 3.0, a leading mobile software development platform.

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