Application managed services (AMS) are at an inflection point. Two application managed services trends are emerging as clear game changers for both buyers and AMS providers: business-aligned application management and service delivery automation (SDA). This post explains why these AMS trends matter now, how they influence application management outsourcing, and how enterprises can use AMS automation and modern AMS models to improve application support and maintenance, drive stronger business outcomes, and deliver cost optimization.
Why AMS Providers Are Innovating
Across the AMS market, providers are investing heavily in differentiating capabilities to gain a competitive edge, win renewal deals, consolidate market share, and retain existing contracts by adding value beyond traditional run support. These market pressures are reshaping application management outsourcing and accelerating the modernization of application support and maintenance, from how success is measured to how services are industrialized and automated.
What’s Changing in Practice
- AMS providers are reframing value from narrow IT service levels to business-aligned outcomes.
- AMS models are evolving with deeper automation, richer knowledge bases, and better integration across the IT stack.
- Buyers are demanding transparency on tooling, intellectual property (IP), and how AMS automation impacts service levels and total cost of ownership.
Trend 1: Business-Aligned Application Management – Moving Beyond IT Metrics
The Challenge of Complex Application Portfolios
Most large enterprises run complicated portfolios that blend major enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, such as SAP and Oracle, with bespoke applications across technologies such as Java and .NET that cut across core business processes. While ERP vendors often offer business-aligned tools and frameworks, extending those uniformly across the broader non-ERP estate is rarely straightforward, raising questions about applicability and adaptability when portfolios span multiple stacks and process inventories.
The Importance of Domain Expertise and KPI Correlation
Domain expertise is essential. To materially influence business outcomes, AMS teams need a solid understanding of the client’s industry, business domain, and best practices. The first step in aligning business and IT is to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter and associate them with the underlying information technology (IT) systems that enable those processes. From there, correlate KPI benchmarks with the client’s current performance and use those insights to jointly identify areas for improvement and a prioritized path forward.
Using Frameworks to Map and Quantify Business Outcomes
Business-aligned frameworks should cross application, middleware, and infrastructure layers to provide visibility, flexibility, and proactive interventions that protect business operations. Most KPI tools allow mapping of IT systems to business processes and offer monitoring across the value chain, enabling system-driven interventions when thresholds are breached.
To gain buy-in, providers must clearly articulate how their involvement links to measurable business outcomes—trust that is often reinforced through outcome-based AMS models where appropriate.
A Practical Playbook to Get Started
- Inventory business processes and map them to applications, integrations, and infrastructure components.
- Select a focused set of KPIs tied to revenue, margin, customer experience, risk, and compliance.
- Establish KPI-to-IT metric correlations, such as order-to-cash cycle time to integration queue latency, and fulfillment accuracy to master data quality.
- Instrument observability across tiers and define alerting rules aligned to business impact.
- Create business-aligned runbooks that prescribe proactive actions when leading indicators drift, not just responses after incidents occur.
- Pilot with one or two value chains, prove benefits, and scale with governance.
Trend 2: Service Delivery Automation (SDA) – Industrializing IT Support
The Impact of SDA on ITO and BPO Service Delivery
Industry analysts have highlighted service delivery automation as a major shift in information technology outsourcing (ITO) and business process outsourcing (BPO) service delivery. The same disruptive forces are reshaping application managed services, prompting leading managed service providers to redraw their strategies and invest in automation-first operating models.
The Role of Knowledge-Based Automation Tools
Automation vendors aim to mechanize significant parts of the service delivery value chain with knowledge-based automation tools that draw on robust knowledge repositories and cognitive capabilities to resolve incidents and requests. In complex scenarios, human experts still step in to analyze root causes and implement sustainable fixes, but the baseline of what can be automated continues to rise.
Current Successes and Limitations in Application Support
Traditional AMS providers increasingly partner with leading automation vendors while also investing in proprietary tools to sustain long-term differentiation. Although there has been strong progress in infrastructure and business process automation, application-side success remains most pronounced in Level 1 and Level 1.5 incident categories. Higher-tier incidents (Level 2 and Level 3) often demand deeper domain expertise, richer context, and change management controls that are not yet fully addressed by out-of-the-box tools.
Scaling SDA in AMS: What It Takes
- Curated, high-quality knowledge bases: codified resolutions, architecture context, and service maps.
- Strong integration with information technology service management (ITSM), configuration management database (CMDB), observability, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to maintain data fidelity as environments change.
- A blend of commercial and proprietary automation assets to balance speed, control, and portability.
- Clear guardrails for human-in-the-loop escalation paths, quality assurance, and risk controls.
Key Questions for Enterprises Considering AMS Automation
As you evaluate AMS automation and modern AMS models, pressure-test the following:
- Will the service provider’s automation capability be a critical buying factor for your organization?
- Will you prefer proprietary or commercial automation tools, and why?
- Who owns the IP of the automation toolset, and how will benefits carry forward if you transition providers?
- How will the automation tools integrate with the provider’s managed services delivery framework and with your internal platforms?
Practical Considerations and Next Steps
- Define target use cases by incident tier, such as Level 1 and Level 1.5 versus Level 2 and Level 3. Quantify expected impact on ticket deflection, mean time to resolve, change failure rate, and cost optimization.
- Require integration with your ITSM, observability, and knowledge systems to ensure the automation engine operates with current topology, dependencies, and runbooks.
- Establish governance for tool IP, portability, and continuity across providers. Document what sits with the provider versus what becomes your reusable asset.
- Align KPIs and business outcomes up front so automation accelerates business-aligned application support and maintenance rather than optimizing low-value metrics in isolation.
- Ask for production evidence: reference architectures, case metrics, before-and-after baselines, and a continuous improvement road map tied to AMS trends and AMS automation
A Readiness Checklist for AMS Transformation
Use this fast diagnostic to gauge where you stand:
- Landscape clarity: Do you have an updated inventory of applications, integrations, environments, and ownership?
- Service baselines: Are incident taxonomies, service-level agreements (SLAs) and experience-level agreements (XLAs), and ticket volumes by category well understood?
- KPI mapping: Have you mapped business KPIs to enabling applications and technical metrics?
- Knowledge health: Are runbooks, known error databases, and architecture diagrams complete and current?
- Toolchain integration: Is there reliable interoperability across ITSM, CMDB, monitoring, and automation tools?
- Governance and IP: Are roles, RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed), and IP ownership rules defined for AMS models and automation assets?
- Change velocity: Is there a plan to keep knowledge and automations in sync with releases and platform updates?
Operating Model Guidance: Blending People, Process, and Tools
Even with sophisticated tools, outcomes hinge on the operating model:
- People: Balance domain experts with site reliability engineers (SREs), platform engineers, and automation subject-matter experts (SMEs). Upskill Level 1 (L1) teams to curate knowledge and train automation agents.
- Process: Shift from reactive triage to proactive reliability practices such as service-level objectives (SLOs), error budgets, and chaos testing, and embed problem management to reduce repeat incidents.
- Tools: Treat automation as a product. Assign ownership, a backlog, and a release cadence. Measure value with a benefits ledger tied to business and technical KPIs.
- Governance: Create a joint steering committee with the provider to prioritize AMS automation investments based on business impact, risk, and time to value.
Conclusion: Partnering for Future-Ready Application Managed Services
Application managed services are evolving quickly, with business-aligned application management and service delivery automation redefining how value is created and measured. Enterprises that align AMS automation to business KPIs—and modernize application support and maintenance with domain expertise, robust frameworks, and integrated toolchains—will unlock the next wave of resilience, speed, and cost optimization.
To explore how this applies to your landscape, partner with Hexaware for application managed services.
