Riverbed China Survey: There is a huge gap between digital vision and digital performance

[Beijing, July 3, 2018] Digital performance company Riverbed Technology recently announced the results of the "2018 Global Digital Performance Survey", with nine countries including China participating in the survey. The Chinese corporate decision makers surveyed unanimously agreed that optimizing digital performance is the basis for optimizing business performance, and almost all (99%) decision makers agree that digitalization (57% strongly agree), including digital service and application delivery, is the key to future business development. However, 96% of these decision makers also said that major obstacles, including budget constraints, traditional networks and poor visualization performance, are hindering companies from advancing digital strategies and providing the performance and customer experience required in today's digital world.

The market survey in China included responses from 100 decision-makers from companies with annual revenues of more than $500 million (about RMB 3 billion). The survey found that despite the importance of digital services and applications to future business success, 92% of respondents said they experience multiple failures of key digital services and applications every month.

“This survey highlights the tremendous opportunities that maximizing digital performance can bring to user experience and business revenue, while also revealing the real challenges facing Chinese companies today,” said Yuan Zhiling, General Manager of Riverbed Greater China. “This survey highlights the advantage that forward-thinking companies are in leading their industries in digital transformation by prioritizing investments in modernizing networks and tools to measure and manage the digital experience of their customers and employees. Companies that hesitate in their digital strategies and processes will quickly fall behind, while companies that drive digital performance will see fruitful business results.”

Clear understanding, immediate action

It is necessary for enterprises to provide successful digital experiences for customers, partners and employees, and the importance of this demand is increasing. 93% of Chinese corporate decision makers believe that providing successful digital experiences is more important to company profits than in the past three years.

Likewise, all Chinese business decision-makers believe their companies will benefit from improving the performance of their digital services and applications. They see this change primarily through:

- Shorter time to market (51%)

- Improved customer/user experience and satisfaction (50%)

- Increased revenue/sales and profitability (48%)

- Increased employee productivity (48%)

- Increased market agility (47%)

Key barriers to implementing a digital strategy

However, it is widely believed that today’s poorly performing systems are the main obstacle to the success of digital strategies. In fact, 96% of Chinese corporate decision makers face severe challenges in achieving a more successful digital strategy, mainly including:

- Overly complex or rigid traditional IT infrastructure (44%)

- Lack of leadership support in prioritizing digital initiatives (42%)

- Lack of available or skilled professionals (36%)

- Budget constraints (27%)

- Lack of comprehensive visibility into digital or end-user experience (27%)

92% of respondents reported that critical digital services and applications have problems multiple times a month, affecting productivity and end-user experience. Nearly half of respondents said they experience this at least once a week, which is much higher than the global average. When critical digital services fail, every minute counts. 52% of Chinese respondents said that they would accept no more than an hour to resolve digital performance issues. This proportion is three times that of companies in the United States, the United Kingdom and India. Chinese corporate decision makers believe that critical digital service issues should be resolved within minutes, and recognize that digital service failures may cost companies tens of millions of yuan in revenue and have a huge impact on customer loyalty and brand reputation.

Chinese business leaders are well aware of the impact these failures have on their businesses. Adverse consequences include:

- Reduced employee productivity (49%)

- Sales and revenues fell (37%)

- Declining brand loyalty (35%)

- Delayed product launch (26%)

- Customer churn (25%)

Invest to maximize digital performance

Astute business leaders are now paying more attention to the management tools and infrastructure of digital services. In fact, all believe that comprehensive visibility of digital experience is critical to successfully measuring and managing digital experience; all Chinese business decision makers believe that providing a more agile modern IT architecture is critical to improving digital performance.

Businesses also say it’s time to take action! 90% of Chinese business decision makers believe that it is critical for companies to invest in improving the digital experience of users or customers in the next year, which is 17 percentage points higher than the global average. The key areas that Chinese business decision makers hope to invest in in the next year include:

- Modernize networks and infrastructure to improve agility (60%)

- Accelerate application development (54%)

- Gaining better ability to monitor and manage end-user experience (52%)

- Improve service capabilities (51%)

Most business decision makers believe that cloud solutions and emerging technologies are key factors in driving digital experience forward. All Chinese business decision makers believe that the use of cloud technology is important to their company's ongoing digital strategy, and the emerging technologies that business leaders hope their companies will invest in include:

Machine learning (54%)

- Artificial Intelligence (53%)

- 5G network (51%)

- Blockchain technology (48%)

- Data analysis (46%)

- Internet of Things (45%)

- Virtual Reality (VR) (40%)

Who is driving China's digital performance?

“Riverbed helps us diagnose and analyze networks, applications, and various devices. Now we can proactively warn, analyze the root cause, and resolve issues quickly through visualization.”

Lenovo Group

“The successful deployment of Riverbed solutions gives us the confidence to provide the firm with greater IT agility and to provision IT infrastructure for new branch offices faster than ever before.”

——Jun He Law Firm

Riverbed 2018 Global Digital Performance Survey Methodology

The Riverbed 2018 Global Digital Performance Survey is an online survey customized by Wakefield Research for 1,000 corporate decision makers from companies with annual revenue of US$500 million or more. The survey was completed in May 2018, and a total of 1,000 corporate decision makers from nine countries including the United States, Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Singapore and the United Kingdom were surveyed. Except for the United States, where there were 200 respondents, there were 100 respondents in each of the other countries.

Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service names or logos used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners.