In the digital age, how should enterprises achieve excellent digital experience?

[51CTO.com original article] Driven by mainstream technology trends such as cloud computing, mobile Internet and analytical tools, digitalization is becoming more and more important. In the digital age, there are more and more business-critical applications in enterprises, and these applications must provide users with excellent digital experience to promote the growth of corporate business. Therefore, IT departments must support various applications running on mobile terminals, cloud terminals, web terminals, and virtual infrastructure. For enterprises, there are many end users, such as employees, partners, customers, and suppliers, and their digital experience is very important.

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Why is it difficult to implement enterprise digital experience management strategy?

Users have higher and higher requirements for digital service experience, but the implementation of digital experience management strategies of many companies is always full of twists and turns, or even fails. There are several important reasons for this:

First, the IT environment continues to become more complex, and the complexity of applications is also increasing. With the rapid development of the Internet, cloud computing, and mobile Internet, as well as the increasing business needs of enterprises, application development platforms, system architectures, and application deployments are undergoing disruptive developments. The complexity of IT operations and maintenance has increased, and the complexity of applications has increased, especially across cloud and local platform deployments. Enterprise IT needs to support applications in any environment, expand applications on demand, maintain high responsiveness across regions around the clock, and realize the interaction between innovative applications and traditional applications, so that end users and customers can interact continuously with applications whose infrastructure has developed into modular, distributed, and dynamic applications.

Second, different teams within the enterprise have different goals. Most IT departments lack consistency with business departments. Their specific needs vary according to their roles, so they can only see part of the digital experience. For example, in a working group, some are responsible for the network, some are responsible for applications, some are responsible for infrastructure, and some are responsible for end-user services. Each small team has its own solution to manage its own area of ​​responsibility.

Third, ineffective tools and detection lead to poor IT monitoring visualization capabilities. Usually, enterprise IT departments use one or more monitoring tools to monitor various fields such as networks, applications, infrastructure, servers, etc. to understand their impact on the end-user experience. However, these monitoring tools often cannot communicate with each other, and performance problems cannot be discovered in time. It is difficult to find the potential root causes of problems that affect performance, and it is impossible to determine the areas where application acceleration is required. Therefore, the IT departments of these companies cannot understand the actual digital experience of employees and users in a timely manner.

Factors that influence user digital experience

In addition, the growth in the number of end users has made digital experience management more complex; the inability of digital experience management tools to provide effective business and technical analysis methods is also the reason why digital experience management is difficult for enterprises; although DevOps can reform the way applications are developed and delivered, there are still some problems in the entire application life cycle. Development bottlenecks still exist, and production problems that paralyze applications and digital services occur.

In short, digital transformation has changed the way companies engage and interact with their end users. Users have increasingly higher requirements for digital experience, and if an app does not respond for a few seconds, users may uninstall it.

How to successfully achieve excellence in digital experience management?

How can enterprises achieve the successful development of digital experience management? In Riverbed's view, to successfully achieve digital experience management, it is necessary to first understand the performance of digital services and their impact on the business, among which understanding the views of end users is particularly important. And without comprehensive monitoring, IT cannot accurately locate where the problem occurs. Therefore, excellent digital experience requires seamless integration between devices, networks, infrastructure and applications. Achieving this goal requires comprehensive visibility, and to obtain comprehensive visibility, end-to-end integrated performance monitoring must be implemented throughout the enterprise and presented on a single panel in a way that is easy for any role to operate.

Riverbed's Digital Experience Management (DEM) solutions help enterprises understand the digital experiences of customers, employees, partners, and suppliers through end-to-end monitoring that captures all types of data and transactions from all end-user devices, networks, infrastructure, and applications at a more granular level, enabling faster and more effective root cause analysis.

“Our customers are making strategic investments in digital business transformation initiatives to improve customer engagement and employee/partner productivity. Achieving a great digital experience is critical to their success. As cloud and mobile technologies become more prevalent, they are finding that traditional tools are not enough to holistically assess and manage the digital experience of their users,” said Mike Sargent, senior vice president and general manager of the SteelCentral business unit at Riverbed. “SteelCentral now offers the most comprehensive, modular and integrated digital experience management solution on the market. It helps companies achieve a reliable, consistent, high-quality end-user experience. SteelCentral is so broad and deep that it goes down to the individual transaction level. We are bringing a whole new level of visibility to help customers achieve their strategic goals.”

Riverbed SteelCentral can assess every aspect of the digital experience for IT departments, monitoring end users, applications, networks, and infrastructure both inside and outside the cloud. In today's highly mobile and digital business environment, it is the only end-to-end solution that combines user experience, infrastructure, application, and network monitoring to achieve a complete view of application performance.

“End-user experience is critical to the success of many digital business initiatives. Poor application performance can impact brand perception and customer satisfaction. SteelCentral offers hybrid device end-user experience monitoring, providing customers with an end-to-end view of application performance, spanning the user device experience, backend network and infrastructure. This capability adds value to enterprise strategy and IT teams as they execute on their digital transformation strategies,” said Mary Johnston Turner, vice president of Enterprise Systems Management Software at IDC Research.

In addition, Riverbed's technology monitors a full range of end-user devices, including mobile phones and VDI, applications, networks and infrastructure components. This data is displayed on a single dashboard of a comprehensive digital experience management (DEM) platform and can be used by relevant personnel such as technical personnel and enterprise managers. Moreover, Riverbed provides a fully integrated but optional solution for DevOps to deal with code bottlenecks, performance issues and business visibility, thereby accelerating software development, improving application delivery, and continuously improving performance while ensuring on-time and high-quality releases.

At a media communication conference held last month, Riverbed officially announced the launch of the Riverbed Digital Performance Platform and a new brand image. With the new positioning, Riverbed has launched a complete, unified, integrated digital performance platform to help users change the way they run applications and services. These applications will closely link people, businesses, and experiences in a digital environment. Riverbed hopes that in this increasingly digital era, as its product technology and solution capabilities continue to strengthen, it will continue to create better digital experiences for users.

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