Compuware (News - Alert) joined in the great annual tradition of taking a look into the metaphorical crystal ball to try and spot what would be big trends in 2013. The company’s foray into the future brought back five major points for the application performance management (APM (News - Alert)) market, and highlights what should be watched for in the coming weeks.

Compuware's study focused on the APM market for the main reason that, essentially, APM is becoming increasingly vital for businesses everywhere, especially in the hallowed halls of the C-level executives. With some studies expecting nearly a 10 percent gain for the APM market (from $2 billion in 2011 to $2.14 billion by the end of this year) there's a lot of gain to be had for individual businesses in the process. But what did Compuware get out of its glimpse into the future?

First, Compuware made a pretty safe prediction that in 2013 the overall complexity of IT management will radically increase. Not only with IT departments facing normal challenges like regulating the use of bandwidth--especially difficult when YouTube (News - Alert) is popular with both slackers and marketing alike--but the growing use of cloud-based applications and the like will also radically change the landscape, prompting the need for new APM to help keep up.

Compuware's next prediction touches on something many already know, but this year would solidify the concept: APM alone won't be enough, and better performance analytics will be required. Tracking performance and maintaining visibility will be extremely important with the new environment, and with the massive volumes of data that businesses can now collect on a huge array of topics, having a way to make sense of it all will be more important than ever before.

Mobile applications would become industrialized under Compuware's third insight, with APM helping to reduce complexity on the mobile front, as well as optimizing applications overall. The growth of mobile devices in the workplace--especially thanks to the growth of the bring your own device (BYOD) philosophy--is making a clear demand for optimized apps, and APM will be a big part of that.

Big data will even get a boost under Compuware's insights, thanks to big data itself going from the experimental level to the operational level. APM in big data will help provide new methods of managing the huge amounts of data involved--as the name implies--in a big data environment, and thus make the output more manageable, and ultimately more useful, for those who produce it.

Finally, APM itself will undergo a significant change. A more "lifecycle approach" will become a part of APM operations, and by extension, that will require the development of both Agile (News - Alert) Operations and DevOps systems. Already we've seen Agile and DevOps drive the development and production of apps in some cases, which means they're likely to catch on elsewhere. Moreover, the benefits of such doctrines--the automation of redundant tasks, for example--produce benefits in improved efficiency and thus, in many cases, cost savings.

By all accounts--especially by Compuware's accounting--it's going to be a very big year indeed for APM, for a wide variety of different reasons. It's always a safe bet to bank on unusual developments in the market space, and counting on APM to help regulate some of those unusual developments makes it a very positive trend, and certainly something for businesses of all sizes to more closely consider themselves.