Growing gap between business needs and IT’s ability to deliver

• 98% of businesses say app performance is critical to business performance
• But 88% say poor app performance negatively affects their work: Riverbed survey

 
A NEW survey by Riverbed Technology has revealed a major performance gap between the needs of business and IT’s current ability to deliver.
 
In the Asia Pacific region, 98% of executives agree that optimal enterprise application performance is critical to achieving optimal business performance, Riverbed said in a statement.
 
Yet, 88% of executives say the poor performance of enterprise applications has negatively impacted their work, with nearly six in 10 (59%) indicating that it impacts their work at least weekly.
 
This performance gap is causing a series of problems for companies, from lost revenue and customers to lower morale to negative impact on brand image, the company said.
 
The Riverbed Global Application Performance Survey 2015 was custom online survey conducted by Wakefield Research on 900 business executives at companies with US$500 million or more in revenue.
 
‘Executives’ are defined as those at manager-level equivalent or above. Research was conducted in October 2015 across eight countries: Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, the United Kingdom and United States.
 
Among the 900 respondents, 200 were from the United States, with 100 from each of the other countries.
 
Companies universally agree that business performance relies on application performance, but nine out of 10 organisations suffer from poor performance on a regular basis, according to the survey.
 
One cause of this performance gap is the move to hybrid IT: Companies are expecting agility and cost benefits, but overlook the network complexities that a hybrid environment holds, Riverbed said.
 
This results in a domino effect of poor application performance impacting employee productivity, it added.
 
“The results of the survey reflect what we’re hearing every day from IT leaders who are looking to deliver superior application performance for quality end-user experience in the midst of rapidly evolving, highly complex and hybrid IT environments,” said Riverbed senior vice president of Asia Pacific and Japan, Bjorn Engelhardt.
 
“But with apps, data and end-users everywhere today, it is hard to control what we can’t see. Companies need end-to-end application visibility, optimisation, and control everywhere as well to close the performance gap,” he added.
 
Lunch-break work
 
The survey found that executives would be willing to sacrifice a lot for applications to work at peak performance at all times.
 
In fact, one in three (34%) surveyed said they would give up their full lunch break to get better performance.
 
At the same time, the frustration of poor application performance can also result in employees taking an extended lunch break (37%).
 
Beyond employee morale, the business cost is real – nearly four in 10 employees have lost clients (35%) or missed a critical deadline (36%) because of poor application performance.
 
Troublingly, executives can contribute to the problem as they try to work around it: Four in 10 respondents say they have used unsupported apps when corporate apps run slowly or stop working altogether, thus adding to infrastructure complexity with more ‘shadow IT.’
 
Globally, 71% of respondents (75% in Asia Pacific) say they have frequently felt ‘in the dark’ about why their enterprise applications are running slowly, spotlighting a disconnect between IT teams and business executives.
 
Cloud complexity
 

 
Migrating apps to the cloud has delivered benefits to the business, but also some challenges, Riverbed said.
 
Nearly all (97%) Asia Pacific executives surveyed use cloud-based apps in their work. Additionally, 87% expect their use of cloud-based apps to increase in the next two years, compared with 84% globally.
 
That’s the good news about cloud apps. The bad news is that hybrid IT is believed to contribute to the performance gap, with 84% of respondents saying they believe trouble-shooting application performance issues is more difficult in a hybrid IT environment (cloud-based apps plus on-premises apps).
 
In fact, according to a survey by Forrester, the majority of companies (51%) say that application complexity is now their primary obstacle to mastering application performance.
 
On average, Asia Pacific respondents estimate it takes 6.7 hours for serious app problems to be completely resolved. This varies widely in the region, with Indian respondents indicating that it takes 10 hours to resolve, and China with the shortest resolution time globally at 4.7 hours.
 
In summary, business executives are leveraging the power of cloud-based applications and hybrid networks to elevate productivity and create happier, more loyal customers and employees.
 
But they’re too often plagued by poor application performance that negatively impacts their business operations, and too often ‘in the dark’ as to why poor app performance is happening and how to stop it, Riverbed said.
 
One key reason for this performance gap is the increased difficulty in getting end-to-end visibility into the complex, hybrid IT architectures that result from the use of both cloud and on-premises apps.
 
For the full survey and additional information, click here.
 
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