By Assaf Sagi, Product Manager for Composite Applications, Precise

Like it or not, consumer IT is all the rage. And by that, we mean the uncontrollable surge in use of mobile devices and consumer sites such as Facebook and Google Docs in the workplace. Gartner, like many other research firms, predicts that tablets, mobile devices and social media will be top strategic initiatives for IT in the near term, according to ZDNet. Naturally, consumer IT is creating more havoc for IT managers while also delivering CIOs the power to affordably innovate again.

The good news: Supporting any number of devices and applications, and even developing enterprise app stores, gives business units and information workers new capabilities and flexibility. User-friendly, consumer technologies help businesses connect with customers in creative, highly interactive ways to drive additional revenue streams and increase customer loyalty.

Infrastructure and application managers, however, are now juggling a lot more balls when it comes to platforms. Given the rapid development of new mobile and Web-based technologies and services, scenarios change daily. “Tablets will be a key issue for tech execs largely because security and management issues abound,” writes Larry Dignan in the ZDNet report. He continues: “One exec told me that those issues are much larger for Android devices. With Apple, there’s iOS and you know what it is and how to secure it. Android has various flavors to defend.”

Enterprise application managers will need to consider the impact of mobile computing on application performance across the organization. Here are a few considerations that CIOs and their teams will need to plan for ASAP:

1. Multi-location access. Users are accessing corporate networks and data over many different networks–from home, the airport, over corporate or public cloud connections–making issues harder to research and locate. This is great for employees but creates a higher incidence of unexpected use patterns as more people log on during unpredictable hours and from unknown locations.

2. Scalability issues. The mobile world also means that organizations are experiencing more transactions than ever before, from both employees and customers, resulting in larger volume and erratic spikes in demand.

3. Instant on. Thanks to the Apple App Store, users want instant satisfaction and no glitches, and they are getting accustomed to ditching apps that are not perfect. What happens to a company if people begin to ditch the critical apps managers need them to use on the job, because they aren’t responding fast enough or working beautifully? This is raising the bar for enterprise application performance standards and usability.

4. App dev standards in flux. If applications are being developed differently for mobile/cloud– HTML 5 for instance is known for its support of mobile caching — that could mean more complex challenges in monitoring and troubleshooting app performance.

5. Multiple versions of the same application. Typically, a corporate site is accessed from a variety of devices, yet each obtains a different version of the same URL. This complicates performance management, since it is not enough to know that you have a performance issue with one URL. You need to know which platforms accessed it, what was the unique user experience for each, and what business logic was invoked as a result.

6. Obscure definition of transaction. In the old Web 1.0 world, a transaction was simply correlated to a Web page. When Web 2.0 came along with richer experiences, enabled by AJAX, a user’s transaction would not necessarily switch the page. For example, consider how many different actions occur on a single page with Gmail. With mobile and tablet applications, it is even harder to define transactions. A “pinch zoom” movement on an iPhone may trigger several URLs on the server. It’s not easy to group several such transactions into a single business event when analyzing the performance of a user complaining about “slow zoom.”

Undoubtedly, mobile business is already top of mind for many application managers. Enterprise IT departments and their technology partners will have to work together to determine how best to support this new segment of users and applications. Maintaining the status quo for application performance isn’t a good option, because employees and customers now have much more power when it comes to information technology. They won’t use a technology or application if it doesn’t work well — or else they will misuse it and the company will miss out on the ROI or somehow disappoint customers. That’s just a risk that no company can take today. What are your thoughts on mobility and how it is changing the practice of application performance management?