I love a good chocolate cake, but baking the same one over and over again can get a bit boring. I like to mix it up with new ingredients and recipes, which is where the Epicurious app comes in. A couple of taps on my smartphone or tablet, and I can access a wealth of inspiration for spicing up the humble chocolate cake recipe.

Apps like these have permeated every area of our personal and professional lives – from fitness training and music making to invoicing and translating.

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Every day hundreds of new offerings make their debut on corporate and consumer app stores around the world. More than a quarter of companies developed five or more internal or customer apps in the last year.

And there’s no let up in sight: Over the next five years, more than half of organizations expect to increase their investment by 20 percent or more to take advantage of the application economy according to data center industry survey results from Uptime Institute Symposium (May 2014).

Does your data center pass the app test?

But the app is just the public face of this new booming sector. Behind every app is a data center. Apps need data. They need APIs. They need patches. They need authentication.

The data center is fundamental to the application economy – as well as supporting apps throughout their lifecycle; it also provides the compute resources needed for software development.

As organizations ramp up their development efforts and app portfolios, the pressure on the data center will only increase. With many facilities already struggling to meet business demands, IT departments need to ensure their data center is fit for the application economy.

DCIM enables organizations to give their data centers a health check – and keep them in optimum condition. DCIM helps achieve such optimum operating conditions by bringing greater control and visibility to three key areas:

Availability

It can lose revenues. It can damage reputations. It can derail application programs. Data center downtime and less than perfect performance have far-reaching consequences, which is why 55 percent of organizations now measure the costs associated with downtime. With DCIM, IT and facilities teams can spot the potential for a data center outage or degradation in performance before it happens – and take faster remedial action when it does. In the application economy, this is essential for safeguarding the time-to-market for new offerings and the user experience on existing apps.

Capacity

With a steady stream of new apps and users, data center capacity can quickly disappear. This invariably results in capital expenditure on new resources, which can undermine the overall ROI from the application economy.

This investment, however, is not always justified. Untapped capacity is concealed in every data center – and DCIM can help to seek it out. Using accurate, real time information on existing data center assets and analytic capabilities such as ‘what if’ capacity planning scenarios, organizations can “right-size” rather than over-size their data center roll outs, reducing both costs and complexity.

Efficiency

Although data centers need to do more to support the application economy, they need to do it for less. As density and workloads increase, data center energy consumption can spiral out of control. With DCIM, IT and facilities departments can stop this spiral. DCIM provides granular information and metrics about when and where energy is being consumed – and how to make continuous improvements.

Proof of that is evident at BBVA: by using DCIM to map room temperatures and achieve visibility of airflows, the bank has decided to shut down grids where no cold air was necessary. This has helped to deliver savings of up to €100,000 a year. By increasing the water temperature of its CRACs by one degree, the bank has also reported a benefit of around €40,000.

Piece of cake

DCIM is also key to facilitating the move to DevOps, which can help accelerate the delivery of proven, high-quality applications. Almost half of application economy leaders have adopted DevOps, according to a CA Technologies study on the application economy.

The demand to launch new applications at an increased cadence is placing additional pressure on IT and facilities to work together to ensure that the data center infrastructure delivers efficiency, availability and agility. From real-time data collection for timely insight to analytics-backed capacity planning and integrated workflow capabilities, IT Ops leaders are finding that DCIM solutions are an essential technology component for enabling the people and process changes needed to facilitate a DevOps culture.

With DevOps and DCIM underpinning development activities and ongoing management, organizations will be better placed to take full advantage of the application economy. And it could prove to be one big advantage.

Application economy leaders (as compared to laggards) are achieving more than double the revenue growth, 68 percent higher profit growth and have 50 percent more business coming from new products and services, according to the same CA study. Those numbers speak for themselves.

For the cake connoisseurs among them, I bet they are on the leading edge of wonderfully inventive chocolate cakes too.

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