There's a simple reason that the importance of application management is growing so rapidly at most companies. Just look at the overall growth of applications. Nearly one-third of those surveyed by EMA say the number of applications deployed at their companies has increased by more than 50% during the past five years--and nearly another quarter say the increase has been between 25% and 50%.

Even more telling, the IT professionals say a huge chunk of the growth has come from applications considered strategic to their business. With so much at stake, everything must be up and running properly.

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What's more important, whether your business applications are available or how they're performing? Since performance comes into play only if something's running, it's no surprise that more IT managers monitor applications for availability than for performance. For example, 84% monitor database apps for availability, but only 79% for performance. And while 63% monitor messaging and middleware apps for availability, the number drops to 52% for performance.

The reason database and in-house apps get such attention seems clear: This is the strategic software that many companies use to run their businesses, so it pays to keep a close eye on it.

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The single most important characteristic of good application-management software is its ability to provide top-quality application performance information, according to those surveyed. That's clear evidence of IT managers' need for accurate performance data, so they can deliver excellent service to their customers.

Ease of use and ease of installation rank as the next two factors in importance. As with many technology products and services today, price ranks only about in the middle in importance. And, surprisingly, easy customization ranks near the bottom. IT managers must be satisfied with the standardized, off-the-shelf features found in their app-management programs.

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Though nothing's perfect, the IT professionals surveyed by EMA rate their app-management software highly. Asked if their tools give them sufficient information to help them effectively manage their applications, 83% said they did. Only 14% rated their tools as inadequate.

Of course, there's always room for improvement. Two-thirds of those surveyed said they'd like to have more information about resource consumption and application availability and performance as seen from the user's view. IT managers are still struggling to understand how individual applications impact the enterprise environment and how they can better estimate the capacity requirements of their software.

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Application-management software is not without flaws. Asked by EMA about the limitations in the products they're using, more than half the IT professionals complained about a lack of information from an end-user perspective. And it's not clear that the end-user measurements they do receive are accurate, since most complained that their software doesn't measure user response times.

Another big complaint is the limited functions available in tools. As you might imagine, given what they try to accomplish, the present generation of application-management software is rated as too difficult to use by almost half of those polled.

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Much of application management focuses on the collection of statistics. But without a clear way to present the data, all the information gathered may go to waste. That's why application management now stresses the reporting side. Businesses can turn the raw technical data into something beneficial.

For the most part, IT organizations use the information they collect about applications to help diagnose faults and improve performance. But at a minority of IT organizations, that data comes back to haunt the managers who collect it.

That's because some people use the information to blame the IT department for application failures.

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A quick way to determine just how important application management is going to be in the future is to ask IT managers about their purchasing plans. There's a nearly even split between the number who say they plan to buy the tools next year and those who don't--with a sizable percentage not certain of their plans.

Asked how they go about evaluating application management tools, the vast majority pick several products and pit them against each other via an in-house trial to see which performs the best. But 31% say they only bother to test one tool before purchase.