Agile network must for India’s digital journey: Riverbed Technology

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Enterprises and digital service providers in India urgently need an agile and flexible network to support the country’s new digital economy which is gravitating towards Cloud- and the Internet of Things (IoT)-based technologies, says a top executive of San Francisco-headquartered IT company Riverbed Technology.

“India’s digitisation drive may hit a roadblock if organisations choose to stay in a traditional static network,” Bjorn Engelhardt, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan, Riverbed Technology, told IANS in an interview.

“Many of the digital projects fail because of the inadequacy of the network. Even many legacy businesses now say that it is time to transform the network,” Engelhardt stressed, adding that Riverbed, which has been in India for more than a decade now, has complete Cloud-to-Edge solutions to help organisations transform their network.

A 2018 study by the digital networking solution provider showed that while almost all business decision-makers in India agree that optimising digital performance is essential for the growth of their businesses, about two-thirds of them face critical digital services and applications failures at least a few times a month.

Digital services failure can adversely affect end-user experience and, in turn, harm businesses.

“We are all focused on the big goal, but we are not focused on how to deliver on that big goal,” Engelhardt said, referring to the findings of the study.

“It is now more critical than ever to invest in modernising networks and in tools to measure and manage the digital experience for customers and employees,” the executive added.

Organisations that face application performance issues often tend to blame the network operators for the delay in opening of their applications and the subsequent delay in delivering digital services without actually investigating the actual cause.

Riverbed, Engelhardt said, has the “visibility tools” to monitor end-user experience and diagnose the application performance issues.

One of such platforms that the company acquired a couple of years ago is called “Aternity” and has the technology to help enterprises see the entire user experience for any application running on any device.

“Aternity” complements Riberbed’s “SteelCentral” (which is part of the company’s Digital Experience Management portfolio) solutions that provide clear insights into how customers are consuming apps, what their digital experience is like, and how that experience directly impacts revenue, productivity and costs, etc.

“We measure everything — from how long it takes to refresh a screen to how long it takes to move from one screen to another. Then we determine whether it is a network issue, Wi-Fi issue or a device issue,” Engelhardt informed.

Riverbed said its networking optimisations tools have helped may organisations in India, including in the public sector, to achieve faster transactions for their customers.

One such organisation is the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) that handles online ticketing operations of the Indian Railways.

“We started doing network optimisation for IRCTC when people were finding it difficult to even log-in to their system. Today, you see how smooth the transactions are at IRCTC,” said Sundar Iyer, Riverbed’s Country Sales Director for India.

Riverbed counts Bajaj Electricals, Cox & Kings, SBI Cards and Timken India among its many customers in India, Iyer informed, adding that the company’s visibility tools are driving its stellar growth in the country.

“We achieved over 70 per growth in India revenues last year,” Engelhardt added.

The company registered more than 74 percent growth in product sales bookings in India in the first half of 2018 compared to the same period last year.

This was in part due to increased demand for the Digital Experience Management (DEM) solutions, which grew 39 percent during that same period.

“In the first half of 2018, Riverbed experienced approximately 176 percent growth in subscription sales in India, versus the same period last year. Nearly all Riverbed solutions will be available as a subscription by end of the year,” the company said in a recent statement.

Riverbed claims that its software-defined local area network (SD-LAN) and software-defined wide area network technologies (SD-WAN) can identify over 2,000 applications and enforce policies that determine priority, line speed, and path selection from a centralised, Cloud-based console.

After monitoring the health of wide area network links, SD-WAN can automatically guide traffic onto an alternate link when it finds that the primary link is congested, thereby optimising application performance.

“We have really good partnership with Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS), both from commercial and technology perspectives. In fact, customers can buy our products from their e-stores,” Engelhardt said, adding that increased Cloud adoption in India would further boost the company’s business prospects.

Riverbed counts Cisco and AppDynamics, among others, as competitors for some of the services that it provides.

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