Whether you have a SaaS application or an eCommerce site, performance is a critical aspect of your success. A lot has happened over the last couple of years in this area. The old standbys in the general area of IT application performance management such as HP, BMC, CA & IBM are being replaced with newer providers who in most cases have SaaS solutions and are some of the fastest growing tech companies.

According to Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring the three leaders are Dynatrace, AppDynamics and New Relic. Dynatrace is the oldest of the three and was started in 2005 and until recently had been part of Compuware. Both of the others were started in 2008 and all are in the general range of 1000 employees. New Relic is public and is forecasting revenue in the range of $175M.

All three are big advocates of Customer Success and New Relic and AppDynamics are very visible in talking about their programs in this area. AppDynamics has the enviable position of having a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 87. A typical software company NPS might be more like 25-50.

I think the keys to success are the use of cloud services both as a target market and in their offerings, taking a broad and comprehensive view of application performance and a focus on customer success.

If you haven't tried these new tools I encourage you to do so, all of them have free trials.