Digital Transformation (DX) is driving organizations to adopt Digital Experience Management (DEM) best practices. Companies hoping to provide the best digital experiences to their end users are often met with challenges arising from disjointed point solutions and a lack of unified insights and management tools across all infrastructure types.
With problematic application lifecycles, ineffective tools, and complex application delivery architectures, enterprises must rethink their existing tools and methodologies to ensure their digital channels, applications, and services are optimized for business and end-user success.
This Riverbed presentation covers the following topics:
- What is Digital Experience Management (DEM)?
- Why DEM is important to organizations?
- What roadblocks and hurdles exist?
- How Riverbed's unified DEM solution is different
- What are some next steps you can take to achieve success with DEM?
Find out more about Digital Experience Management with Riverbed here http://rvbd.ly/2y0MHpt
In this day of always-on connectivity, users – be they consumers, employees, partners, or vendors – expect any app or service they access to be quick, reliable, and always available, regardless of whether they are on-the-go or connected to a corporate network.
The end-user’s digital experience is not only critical to a business’s success, it is also paramount for its survival, and has become a core business objective as a result.
Unfortunately, not all currently available solutions provide deep and holistic insights across the entire digital experience. And these tools frequently only provide part of the picture, without a clear means to manage and optimize IT systems to improve those digital experiences.
In this presentation, we will be covering the concept of Digital Experience Management (DEM), why DEM is so critical during this time of Digital Transformation, what possible roadblocks or hurdles a company may encounter as they journey towards a successful DEM strategy, how Riverbed’s unified DEM solution is a differentiator in the marketplace, and what next steps a company should undertake when evaluating DEM strategies.
What is Digital Experience Management?
First, it is important to understand some key terms that executives frequently encounter in a digitally-connected economy. Digital Business – all things and people communicating via digital processes. Digital Transformation – using digital technology to evolve business processes and other aspects of a business. Digital Experience – the interaction of end users on their digital apps and services. Digital Experience Management – a means to optimize and control the delivery of digital apps and services to end users in order to improve business and service performance and well as app design and development.
“Digital Experience Management (DEM) has grown from its roots in network monitoring and application performance management (APM) to become a critical component of IT service delivery and IT-to-business alignment.”
- Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) – July 2017
What is Digital Experience Management important in this digital age?
We live in a world of the digital business. The majority of enterprises are investing in digital initiatives today with digital technology being a top priority for business leaders. Looking ahead, investments will continue growing at an aggressive pace, doubling in three years from today.
Major analysts point to various digital trends including exponential growth of Internet-connected, end-user devices; an upswing in digital revenue – especially in retail which is driven by digital sales; B2B digital commerce tracking to hit $1.13 trillion by 2020; huge focus on competition at the customer experience level.
Poor Digital Experiences can have a dramatic financial impact on a business. It can also damage the company brand. Amazon tells us that 1 sec
of eCommerce page slowdown can cost up to $1.6B in annual sales1. Looking at the financial trading industry, A typical broker loses $4M in revenues per millisec when their trading platform is 5 millisecs behind their competitor2
As with any digital transformation, there are challenges to be aware of. Following are some potential DEM roadblocks to consider.
Altimeter: Top Digital Transformation Challenges:
71% - Don’t understand the behavior or impact of new connected customers (up from 53% in 2014)
69% - Lack data or ROI to justify value of digital transformations (up from 34% in 2014)
63% - Are challenged by changing their company culture to be more agile (No change from 2014)
2016 Survey - http://www.altimetergroup.com/pdf/reports/The-2016-State-of-Digital-Transformation-Altimeter.pdf
2014 Survey - https://www.prophet.com/thinking/2014/07/the-2014-state-of-digital-transformation/
While there can be many roadblocks or hurdles when approaching Digital Experience Management, there are three important ones:
Problematic Application Lifecycles – understanding, resolving, and improving Digital Experiences are hampered by a lack of visibility into root causes and current performance levels.
Ineffective DEM tools & Instrumentation – point solutions and departmental siloes create compartmentalized issue identification.
Complex Application Delivery Architectures – application delivery is now comprised of a wide variety of IT components.
Problematic Application Lifecycles – understanding, resolving, and improving Digital Experiences are hampered by a lack of visibility into root causes and current performance levels.
Do you understand the current performance levels for all aspects of the digital experience – from end users to applications to network to infrastructure?
Can you easily identify the underlying root cause of performance issues quickly?
Do you know what areas require application acceleration, application refactoring, or new development altogether?
Ineffective DEM tools & Instrumentation – point solutions and departmental siloes create compartmentalized issue identification.
EMA study indicates that current DEM tools are ineffective at identifying the root cause of issues, getting true granularity of usage data, conveying the business impact to others within the organization, and understanding the true performance impact as well as user satisfaction.
Complex Application Delivery Architectures – application delivery is now comprised of a wide variety of IT components, and this list continues to grow to include not only services, locations, databases, on-premise equipment, cloud, various architecture, physical and virtual servers, mobile and other devices, and distributed networks, but also microservices and containers.
A single issue within the digital application or service delivery can degrade the entire Digital Experience, and can affect other components of the chain, causing a cascading degradation and sub-par experience.
How does enterprise IT deals with the complexity of managing the Digital Experience (DE)?
Let’s consider the pitfalls of the typical management approach. Traditionally, IT deployed multiple monitoring tools to monitor each domain, one or more tools for the network, infrastructure, the application, the servers etc. In this approach you end up with dozens of disjointed tools each separately monitoring each domain, often showing no issues, while the end users still complain of poor app performance or service.
The result is typically a finger pointing situation where each domain lead will claim that their respective area is not causing the issue while the problem remains unresolved.
Why is this approach ineffective in managing DE?
The reason is that point solutions are not designed to talk to each other and while they are adequate at monitoring one specific domain, they were never designed to look at the whole system collectively. In order to quickly identify the root cause of an issue, you need the ability to link several detected events that may not individually identify the problem but collectively point to the cause of the degraded of DE.
Not all Digital Experience Management solutions are the same. Riverbed has some key differentiators that make is stand above the rest.
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An effective Digital Experience Management solution must be unified in its high-definition data gathering, analysis, monitoring, and measurement in order to provide proactive problem detection which drive to faster resolution times. The solution must capture granular data of all types and have the ability to provide actionable analytics and insights to different types of corporate audiences.
Riverbed SteelCentral is unique in the market place fro many reasons, here are the key differentiators:
First, we measure the business impact of poor DEM, provide rapid root-cause analysis, and guide remediation for fast problem resolution,
Second, we capture data and transactions from all end-user devices, networks, infrastructure all the time at the most granular level for 100% effective Root-cause Analysis,
Third, we offer integrated and role-specific performance insights, blending & correlating analysis from all domains, providing a one-stop solution for managing DE, and
Finally, we integrate tightly with other Riverbed solutions where SteelCentral performance insights, guide fixing, optimizing and prioritizing application and network performance by SteelConnect (SD-WAN), SteelHead (WAN Optimization) and SteelFusion (Edge IT).
What are the next steps to successful Digital Experience Management?
How can you pursue an effective Digital Experience Management strategy? Follow this checklist:
Do your due diligence
Talk to your peers
Compare vendors
Read analyst reports
Review some case studies
Watch webinars
Attend conferences
Get some hands-on experience
ASK LOTS OF QUESTIONS!!!
There are a variety of Riverbed assets available to help you with your DEM strategy. Download the Riverbed DEM Whitepaper, try out Riverbed SteelCentral Aternity or SteelCentral AppInternals, read through more details on Riverbed’s DEM solutions, and read analyst whitepapers like the EMA’s “Best Practices for Successful Digital Experience Management.”
Please click on any of the educational assets listed or visit:
https://www.riverbed.com/solutions/digital-experience-management.html
Thank you. To learn more, visit http://www.riverbed.com.