08 December 2015
Frustrations with slow or crashed applications lead to lower staff morale.
IT is failing to deliver business needs, according to research conducted by Riverbed Technology.
In its Global Application Performance Survey 2015, 89 per cent of executives polled said that the poor performance of enterprise applications has negatively impacted their work, and 58 per cent said it impacts their work at least weekly.
Riverbed carried out its study by interviewing 900 business executives (those at manager-level or above) at corporations with $500 million or more in revenue. Among the respondents, 200 were in the US while the rest were in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India and the UK.
Ninety-eight per cent of the executives surveyed agreed that optimal enterprise application performance is critical to achieving optimal business performance. As a result, the study found that many of them would be willing to sacrifice a lot for applications to work at peak performance at all times, including 33 per cent who would give up their full lunch break.
Globally, 71 per cent said of respondents said they have frequently felt “in the dark” about why their enterprise applications are running slowly, spotlighting a disconnect between IT teams and business executives.
Worryingly, Riverbed says executives can contribute to the problem as they try to work around it: 37 per cent admitted they have used unsupported apps when corporate ones run slowly or stop working altogether, thus adding to infrastructure complexity with more ‘shadow IT’.
According to the firm, one cause of the performance gap is the move to hybrid IT. Nearly all respondents use cloud-based enterprise applications in their work, and 84 per cent said such usage will increase over the next two years.
Riverbed says while migrating apps to the cloud brings agility and cost benefits, it also brings complexity as other apps are still on-premises. It says there is therefore 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.
“The results of the survey reflect what we’re hearing every day from IT leaders who are looking to deliver superior application performance in the midst of rapidly evolving, highly complex and hybrid IT environments,” says Riverbed chairman and CEO Jerry M. Kennelly. “With apps, data and end users everywhere today, companies need end-to-end application visibility, optimisation, as well as control everywhere to close the performance gap.”
The vendor warns that without this companies will continue to suffer from problems such as lost revenue and customers, a negative impact on their brand image, and lower staff morale.
In terms of the latter, 29 per cent of employees said they had taken an extended lunch break as a result of poor application performance, 26 per cent used slow or down apps as an excuse for missing a deadline, and 26 per cent even left work early because of such problems.
