A new year is a time for goals, resolutions … and predictions. At the beginning of the year, I polled our INETCO team and asked the question, "What is most likely to change when it comes to monitoring banking applications and financial transaction management in 2013?" Here are my favorite five responses:

Prediction 1: Banks will realize the value in monitoring anything that moves ... money!

For a long time, banks have carefully engineered the performance of their core systems and monitored the uptime of the "unattended" delivery channels that tie into the core system (e.g., ATM, IVR, online banking). In 2013, we'll see an explosion of these unattended delivery channels and a strong focus on monitoring their performance in terms of response time, failed interactions, and usage.

Prediction 2: Transaction-based APM will be adopted as a "best practice" to manage critical banking applications, third party SaaS and service delivery.

Core banking and service channels continue to morph and expand. Modern applications are often not communicating with core banking applications. Customer facing channels such as ATM, mobile, online banking, POS, self-service kiosks, IVR banking and branch tellers are a mishmash of critical devices and service applications, all with a number of hardware, legacy system and network infrastructure dependencies.

To deliver timely resolution of transaction performance issues affecting customer experience, monitor applications living in virtual or cloud-based environments, and to manage core banking channels in a cost-effective way, more ATM and IT operations teams will turn to transaction-based application performance monitoring as a best practice solution.

Prediction 3: ATM and IT operations will be keen to learn how they can get more leverage out of their IT investments.

What if banks were given the option to monitor one core banking channel or many core banking channels from the same performance monitoring software? Or they could invest in one scalable software deployment that could monitor any and many applications in real-time?

This is the year to do just that. Multiple banking and service delivery channels will often share critical application components, especially on the back end. CIO's are realizing that it is important, and now possible, to have a common end-to-end transaction monitoring and troubleshooting solution, rather than leave each delivery channel owner to their own devices.

Prediction 4: 2013 is the year of the analytics.

We are collecting enough data and, through cloud computing, have enough processing power that we can start turning the "scientific method" (i.e., question-research-hypothesis-experiment-analysis-conclusion) on its head. That is, we can use data analysis to form conclusions about things where we have asked no questions and formed no hypothesis.

By the end of 2013 this new way of determining facts/conclusions will become an accepted addition to our current scientific methodology and there will be startup companies that specialize in it.

Prediction 5: Emerging economies will need to improve the monitoring of cell infrastructures.

Emerging economies that have never had a widespread wired telco infrastructure have deployed cell infrastructures and are leveraging these to create a variety for payment, top up and e-wallet types of applications. They will continue to see a high adoption rates which will create stress on their service and security levels. This will continue to create an increased demand for monitoring applications.

Whether our team is right or wrong, the next 12 months will tell. I would love to hear what you expect to happen when it comes to monitoring banking applications in the coming year. Please share your thoughts …

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