Whereas traditional Network Performance Management solutions deliver a limited scope, the most effective way for your organization to mitigate its data limitations is to adopt a full-stack AIOps and observability platform. By delivering full-fidelity visibility across all layers of the digital enterprise–including applications, networks, endpoint devices, digital employee experience (DEX), public cloud, zero trust frameworks, and mobile environments–the right solution has the power to revolutionize your approach to blind spots, dramatically reduce operational costs and help future-proof your modern IT environment.

Blind spots and business risk

Currently, IT teams face significant pressure to maintain reliability and security while keeping up with ongoing digital transformation initiatives. When critical issues go undetected and services fail without warning, ensuring a consistently high-quality user experience becomes increasingly challenging. In turn, this forces teams into a reactive stance that leads to longer incident response times and can impact important business objectives.

It’s a challenge that becomes particularly difficult when troubleshooting. When your IT specialists lack full visibility into the entire network, triaging technical problems turns into a frustrating game of trial and error–an inefficient approach that wastes precious time and resources. When Mean Time to Repair takes longer as a result, customer satisfaction drops, and strategic initiatives ultimately get delayed.

The situation gets even harder when you consider that hybrid and remote access employees can now connect from anywhere through a myriad of home networks, personal devices, SaaS tools, and cloud platforms. Plus, encrypted Zero Trust security models make it even more challenging to monitor performance and identify anomalies outside of the typical corporate boundaries. Without end-to-end visibility from endpoint to cloud, IT teams are basically operating in the dark.

By taking a holistic approach, Riverbed’s NPM+ solution can shed some much-needed light on these previously unseen risks by collecting packet data at every user and server endpoint before it has been encrypted or tunneled. Essentially, that means your organization can bridge the visibility gaps caused by increased network complexity–transforming observability, enabling faster issue detection, reducing downtime, and ensuring uncompromised service availability.

The hidden cost of blind spots

The consequence of overlooked blind spots in the network goes well beyond just technical issues. In reality, these operational inconveniences can actually spiral into something much more impactful.

For example, recent data published by the Treasury Committee shows that ‘nine of the top banks and building societies operating in the UK accumulated at least 803 hours–the equivalent of more than 33 days–of unplanned tech and systems outages in the last two years’. This occurred across over 150 separate incidents, affecting millions of customers in the process.

The aggregate cost of frequent IT network failures evidently stacks up–and that’s just in one industry in one country. It’s clear to see that blind spots can routinely cause damage by:

• Impacting revenue, with disruptions and downtime directly harming sales opportunities, especially as industries become increasingly reliant on digital services.
• Compromising business relationships by pushing customers, vendors or partners away through a lack of trust and confidence.
• Incurring higher operational costs, because more time spent firefighting means higher IT expenses and lower employee efficiency.
• Risking regulatory punishment, as undetected blind spots can lead to compliance violations, exposing businesses to legal and financial penalties.

Learn to see clearly with AIOps and observability

Most organizations still rely on fragmented, siloed tools that are becoming less effective at meeting modern needs. However, AIOps and observability platforms can provide the intelligence needed to detect and mitigate network blind spots in real-time. This is the consensus too, as our recent Global AI & Digital Experience Survey revealed that 82% of business leaders believe that ‘observability to overcome network blind spots’ is of importance.

Comprehensive AIOps for observability platforms support your IT teams to manage all elements of your digital ecosystem–whether that’s a hybrid cloud environment, virtual desktop infrastructure, unified communications or endpoint devices. By harnessing AI and machine learning for anomaly detection, IT teams are empowered to:

• Automate incident management and routine monitoring, allowing resources to be allocated to business-imperative areas.
• Use predictive analytics to pinpoint problems before they escalate into debilitating issues, then deploy root cause analysis to prevent issues from recurring.
• Resolve incidents faster, preventing potential reputational and financial repercussions in the process.
• Shift towards a proactive approach, eliminating downtime and improving service stability for users across the network.

Compared to self-contained point solutions that lack flexibility and scalability, these true AIOps for observability platforms allow you to cut operational expenses while still streamlining system performance. In that way, it offers a win-win scenario in which productivity, customer satisfaction, and revenue can all exponentially increase.

Turning obstacles into outcomes

Though often hidden beneath the surface, the costs of IT blind spots are increasingly hard to overlook—leading to extended downtime, heightened security risks, lost revenue, and reputational damage–and the impact of ineffective monitoring exists within every layer of today’s complex IT environment.

They need to look no further. Organizations that adopt AIOps for observability can achieve remarkable gains in IT efficiency, driving down costs while enhancing digital experiences. These platforms signal a shift toward a future where businesses move past reactive troubleshooting and embrace proactive innovation–transforming former operational challenges into valuable strategic advantages.

Ready to join the blind spot revolution? Visit our AIOps for Observability Solutions page for real-world success stories, insights, and resources to unlock smarter, faster IT operations. Resolve tomorrow’s IT issues today.

• Maintaining seamless IT infrastructure performance.
• Ensuring optimal utilisation of critical applications and medical devices.
• Facilitating a productive environment for healthcare professionals.

AIOps is reshaping cost efficiency within healthcare organisations, revolutionising the way healthcare is delivered, and setting new standards for operational excellence. All the while, it supports a spend-to-save initiative in the healthcare sector, allowing organisations to fully utilise their investments and achieve more with less.

Here’s how these tools can help healthcare organisations overcome the aforementioned obstacles by providing real-time insights into the performance of critical systems, applications, and devices–enabling leaders to make informed decisions that drive cost efficiency, elevate productivity, and enhance experiences.

Maximise hardware and asset refresh budgets

Spending funds efficiently and with care can maximise impact on Trusts. Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust (KCHFT), one of England’s largest NHS community health providers, serving a population of about 1.4 million. It oversees more than 5,000 staff and hundreds of applications and hardware assets. KCHFT prides itself on being responsive to its patients’ needs and sought to gain end-to-end visibility into its application and hardware performance. To this end, achieve this, KCHFT’s IT team deployed unified observability, offering up-to-the-minute insight into device usage and overall health.

This approach allows the Trust to replace, refurbish, recycle or remove hardware based on its remaining life rather than physical age. Darren Spinks, Head of IT Operations at Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust, shared: “Riverbed showed us we wouldn’t need to replace 42% of our 1,784 devices aged five years or older. This has meant that we’ve already returned our investment.” Additionally, these platforms pinpoint the exact usage of licenses, allowing Trusts to establish which are truly required; two NHS Trusts have demonstrated they could save between £130k and £230k on their software licence costs.

Reduce service desk tickets and free up time to improve patient care

Within the NHS, there’s a growing need to “shift left” in the service desk using intelligent automation and self-healing. Unified observability meets this need by combining full-fidelity cross-domain data, machine learning, correlation and more for faster problem-solving. As a result, Trusts can accelerate incident response, minimise security risks, populate trouble tickets with supporting data, guide remediation of desktop issues, and automate recovery actions.

It initially took time for KCHFT to determine the root cause of performance problems, so it saw the benefit of this first-hand. Spinks told us: “Riverbed’s solution alerted us hours before our service desk received a call regarding the incident. Now, we don’t need to wait for a user to tell us there’s a problem. It informs us of the issue, its impact, and the implications regarding time and cost.”

Another UK customer, The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust (PAHT), serves a local population of around 350,000 people and provides a full range of general acute, outpatient, and diagnostic services. It’s gone from receiving 629 service desk tickets outside its SLA to consistent single figures using auto-remediation, which it employs around 10,000 times a month. This ensures that all staff members feels supported and more productive, freeing up their time for them to focus on what really matters: patient care.

Improve experiences for clinicians and patients

In today’s hybrid world, every interaction matters, and healthcare organisations must measure and manage digital experiences (DEX) for both staff and the people they serve–then strive to make them more compelling. Riverbed identifies and optimises DEX hot spots, creates efficient pathways to streamline workflows for clinicians, practitioners, nurses, and consultants, and empowers all employees to deliver the quality of service and responsiveness patients expect and deserve.

PAHT’s ICT team found that 947 hours were lost each quarter due to unresponsive blue screens, negatively impacting patient care. Riverbed’s unified observability platform has reduced this to 211 hours. Jeffrey Wood, Deputy Director of ICT at the Trust, explained: “After deploying Riverbed’s unified observability solutions, we reduced the number of application crashes (by hang) by nearly 50%. We’ve saved almost 700 hours, around 28 days per month, which we’re effectively giving back to clinicians.”

Furthermore, many applications used by staff were legacy-based, unstable, and challenging to maintain due to the age of hospital devices–65% of which were seven years old or older, and 85% of which were PC desktops rather than more mobile laptops. Riverbed’s Aternity solution provided full visibility across the end-user experience, uncovering the impact of outdated devices on their infrastructure. It also empowered them to proactively fix issues before clinicians even notice, boosting work rate by 25%, staff satisfaction, and patient outcomes.

Stay sustainable

Unified observability solutions can help organisations reduce their carbon footprint while cutting costs and meet long-term sustainability goals like achieving net zero. In March 2023, PAHT required the carbon equivalent of 4,000 trees to offset idle user devices. With our data and automation tools, they’ve reduced this to around 733 trees, realising £200k in-year savings on electricity bills in the process. Altogether, these could deliver more than £1.2 million in savings to the board.

Overall, the ICT team at PAHT will see a £3 million saving over a three-to-five-year period thanks to Riverbed’s unified observability, while improving outcomes–now spending just under 40% of their time fighting fires, down from 85-90%. On average, our NHS customers experience a 58% acceleration in application login times, a 40% average reduction in IT spend on hardware refresh, and a 70% reduction in Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

Trust us to help you achieve similarly incredible results–driving in-year savings, elevating productivity, and enhancing experiences for everyone. Reach out today to learn how. Together, we can unleash the full potential of your infrastructure and unlock the power of your investments, from server room to operating room to boardroom.

This data can be leveraged to deliver the exceptional experiences customers and staff demand–but only if it’s captured, monitored, and used to its full potential. If it isn’t, it can create more than just a headache, making it difficult to identify and address issues, which can affect passengers and your reputation.

While countless tools are available on the market to help you tame and transform this data into something useful, very few of them are comprehensive and holistic, giving observability across your entire infrastructure. Riverbed steps in with its unified observability platform, highlighting qualified and actionable events before they require reactive measures. Here are a few ways Riverbed empowers airlines to do more with data, focus on the broader picture, and achieve superior outcomes.

Enhancing the customer and employee experience

Your passengers expect easy and efficient experiences from the moment they choose to fly with you. Everything from booking tickets on your website to checking in on their smartphone, dropping bags at your kiosk and enjoying in-flight entertainment must be seamless and satisfying. Meet these needs, and they’ll already be looking forward to their next trip with you–fail to, and they’ll simply travel with someone else in future.

Riverbed can help you meet and exceed the most challenging customer demands by optimizing connectivity and application delivery for reliable reservation systems, ticket processes and check-in, and real-time flight updates.

Employees, too, are driven by their experiences. Their job satisfaction decreases, and they become more likely to leave when they are burdened with outdated IT systems, frequent downtime, and poor data management. Riverbed’s automation and self-healing capabilities free people from fighting fires so they can focus on what really matters, while its user-friendly dashboards make data easy to understand–and services and projects a breeze to prioritize.

Providing unmatched visibility and insight

For smooth operations, even during cloud migrations, you need real-time visibility across all your IT services and your entire infrastructure, applications, and back-end systems. One of the United States’ major airlines was having trouble gaining this across common-use areas. That is, areas of airports that aren’t owned or leased by airlines, where pilots and other staff will go to check manifestos, schedules, route changes, incidents and more. Often, connections would drop between the airport and the airline, offering no reason why–or instructions on what staff needed to do next.

Riverbed IQ, part of our Unified Observability Platform, has empowered the airline to bridge the gap, identifying problems and providing workarounds to deliver team members the information they need to do their jobs effectively. In future, we’ll be working together to move to an AI operations platform–using automation to speed things up, provide even more insight, eliminate the need for war rooms and lower mean time to recovery.

One of the airline’s IT leaders said: “Riverbed IQ is helping my team realize a self-healing network. Using the built-in features of runbooks and AI/ML, we can reduce the number of alerts and capitalize on our automation processes to perform corrective actions to the network before users experience impact. Riverbed IQ is a game changer in monitoring and unified observability.”

Maintaining the performance of critical apps

As we touched on earlier, your apps are more plentiful and vital than ever. One airline we work with has between 1,200 and 2,000 apps – all of which are needed day-to-day – from flight-planning systems and online ticketing to call-center monitoring.

We drove digital transformation and cloud growth for another major US airline, which was tied down by legacy data centers and struggling to innovate as a result. Using Riverbed AppResponse and Riverbed NetProfiler tools, the organization was able to gain full telemetry and proactive problem-solving across their critical reservations system–keeping it running and running well. Since deployment, the airline’s been able to:

• Set a baseline for performance, and see when this isn’t being met
• Map application transactions and become more process-orientated
• Carry out network performance analysis and optimization using both up-to-the-minute and historical data
• Troubleshoot issues and remedy them automatically, at the root
• Integrate our telemetry with customer incident management tools and processes
• Receive real-time alerts that really matter, reducing notification fatigue
• Achieve all this across every one of its cloud and hybrid environments

Boosting sustainability

The aviation industry is under increasing pressure to reduce its carbon footprint–depending less on jet fuel and improving waste management. Riverbed captures actual performance data from all applications and devices, translating it into actionable environmental insights to help you reduce your carbon emissions and protect our planet.

This could mean identifying hotspots in energy consumption, or printers and the number of pages they’ve produced, and automatically minimizing their impact. It may involve finding idle devices that should be shut down–notifying the user to do so and powering off remotely if they don’t respond. Or it might look like quantifying the carbon footprint of user activities, such as sending emails. The possibilities are countless, each supporting you on your journey to net zero while improving your reputation with stakeholders, passengers, and the media.

There’s no doubt that Riverbed’s solutions are changing the game for airlines, elevating digital experiences and putting organizations’ data to work for them. Get in touch with our team now and find out how we can empower you to satisfy the people who matter, stay out of the news, streamline your operations, and speed past the competition.

However, there’s a simple way to maintain control of and access your infrastructure: unified observability solutions like the portfolio from Riverbed. With its innovative automation and self-healing capabilities, unified observability makes managing your tech in-house easier than ever. The platform pulls together big data from all your digital touchpoints, prioritizing tasks to minimize manual processes, mitigate alert fatigue, and accelerate mean time to repair.

Here’s how it’s empowering insurance firms like yours to achieve their most critical goals, right now:

Revolutionizing the customer experience

Every insurance company wants to be the go-to brand for customers, and front of mind when prospects are choosing who to protect them. To achieve this, it’s crucial to equip your staff the tools they need to understand and connect with the people you serve and understand their behaviors and habits. Essentially, improving the customer experience depends on enhancing the employee experience; allowing staff to do their jobs seamlessly, effectively, and productively, and they’ll be satisfied and better equipped to fulfill the evolving digital preferences of customers.

Perhaps a customer wants to pay less for health insurance, as their smartwatch data proves they live an active lifestyle, or maybe another only drives for work and needs to pause car insurance fees over the weekend.

Whoever your customer is and whatever their unique situation, they’ll also expect perfect uptime and availability of your services–on whichever connected devices they access them, from intelligent home devices to the standard smartphone. And if they have any queries or problems, they’d ideally like to deal with you through a clued-up chatbot rather than hanging around on hold for hours.

The chances are you already have the necessary data to meet these seemingly impossible demands. You just have too much of it, stored in disparate silos, and no way of making sense of it all. Enter Riverbed Unified Observability, which uses AI and machine learning to instantly and automatically show you this information on easily understandable single-pane dashboards. This means you can focus less on manual processes and customer service woes and more on strategy, tailoring your products to real desires rather than your best guess.

One of our global reinsurance customers used Riverbed for exactly that, saying: “Now that we have Riverbed’s Digital Experience Management solution, we have already seen benefits in terms of gaining insights we can act upon to improve delivery of services to our customers.”

Enhancing efficiencies to compete and grow

Today, your competitors aren’t the long-established, tried-and-trusted insurance brokers of old. They’re the snappy FinTech start-ups taking the market by storm–born in the cloud, without legacy tech or the burden of premises holding them back. To keep up, you’ll need to make changes, like moving critical applications to the cloud and reducing your physical footprint (which can also help cut your carbon footprint).

With Riverbed, you can become more streamlined than ever before, putting you not just on the same footing as these responsive newcomers but also ahead of the game. By capturing, analyzing, and giving up-to-the-minute insight on every action taken by employees and customers– then automatically creating shortcuts, remedying issues, and highlighting or even switching off underutilized machines–the platform takes care of the everyday so you can look after what really matters, like planning for your future growth. It also works effortlessly across hybrid environments, supporting you as you transition to the cloud.

The reinsurance customer mentioned earlier also used Riverbed to integrate cloud provider data with endpoint metrics, providing accurate customer experience information and identifying CPU processing issues across 80 locations. They said: “Riverbed’s Digital Experience solution allowed us to identify issues quicker, troubleshoot and validate them. Sometimes, issues seem fixed, but from a customer perspective, the problem persists. With Riverbed’s solutions, we are able to collaborate with other IT departments and vendors to get the issue resolved more effectively.”

Becoming more sustainable

All businesses must become more eco-friendly, not just to protect our planet but to uphold their reputation, too. Customers want to use companies they believe in, support, and trust, especially when it comes to insurance, By proving you care about the environment, you show you care about the people within it, too. It’s about driving genuine, meaningful change–such as leading on climate action, forging lasting community ties, operating sustainably, and reaching that net-zero milestone in the not-too-distant future.

Unified observability can help you reduce the amount of office space and server-room storage you need by supporting your transition to the cloud and hybrid working. It can give insight into unused or underperforming devices, allowing you to sweat the assets–recycling or refurbishing them only when they reach the end of their working life. It can also tell you when staff have stepped away from laptops for a prolonged period without shutting down, nudging them to do so with a notification or powering off remotely. As well as providing undeniable environmental benefits, these actions can save you money. One of our UK-based insurance customers is aiming for cost savings of £750 million by the end of 2024–a reality made possible with Riverbed’s Unified Observability and Acceleration portfolios.

Meanwhile, our global reinsurance customer used this function in Riverbed’s Unified Observability Platform to extend the lifecycle of its machines from three years to four. They said: “Moving forward, Riverbed can help us make decisions on hardware replacement, whether to replace laptops or desktops entirely, or whether to replace individual hardware components. This has the potential to increase the effective use of our finite resources and target customers who really need our assistance.”

To learn how your insurance company can maximize existing investments, delight staff and customers, embrace digital transformation, and remain competitive now and in the future, get in touch with our dedicated team now.

• Rapidly evolving consumer behavior: The COVID pandemic has shifted customers from physical stores to online platforms, demanding exceptional digital experiences. Even with brick-and-mortar stores back in operation, consumers continue to expect seamless service across websites and apps. According to Riverbed’s 2023 Global Digital Employee Experience (DEX) survey, which polled 1,800 business and IT decision-makers across 10 countries and seven industries, 96% of retail leaders believe that offering a seamless digital experience is crucial (with 59% considering it critically important) for competitive advantage.
• Technological advancements: Artificial intelligence. Augmented reality. Cloud. SaaS. Virtualization. The pace of technology has never been faster, spurred by the rise of hybrid work and escalating customer expectations. It can seem impossible for retailers to know what to invest in and where they’ll see the best return on investment, without adding to an already-complex technology stack.
• Financial constraints: It’s expensive to run a retail store. Let alone several, let alone several hundred. It’s even costlier when staff can’t work to their full potential or productivity due to shortages and skills gaps. Despite this, teams are still expected to reduce costs through IT optimization while satisfying both customers and employees.

If these challenges sound familiar, you might have explored or invested in digital tools to address them. Yet, deploying more (and more complex) solutions can introduce new issues. Below, we outline three common digital hurdles and how Riverbed Unified Observability can help.

Operational inefficiencies

Better tech doesn’t necessarily mean better organization, and retailers often struggle with operational inefficiencies that can impact productivity and profitability. These inefficiencies can stem from factors like supply chain complexities, poor inventory management, and disjointed communication among employees.

Unified observability steps in as a comprehensive monitoring and analytics platform, providing real-time insights into operational performance. By capturing and analyzing data from end-user devices, applications, and networks, it helps identify bottlenecks, streamline processes, and optimize resource allocation, leading to improved operational efficiency.

End-User experience gaps

You know you must deliver seamless, personalized experiences to attract and retain customers. But you’ve also got to provide your employees with these exceptional experiences, and 95% of retail leaders recently surveyed believe they’ll need to provide more advanced digital experiences as new generations of employees enter the labor market.

This is a crucial point for you to consider, as Millennial and Gen Z employees comprise a larger portion of the retail workforce than other industries. 61% of survey respondents in retail said there would be a disruptive and reputational impact on their company if digital natives’ experience expectations weren’t met; they also claim that 73% of younger-generation employees would consider leaving the company if they didn’t have a seamless digital experience. Less than ideal, considering staff shortages are rife in the industry (39% agree)–and costly to your business.

Unified observability aids in keeping customers and staff–and keeping them happy–by monitoring the end-user experience. It collects data on application responsiveness, transaction times, and user interactions for everyone using your systems at each end, enabling retailers like you to identify and proactively address performance issues. This comprehensive visibility and data into your user journeys help retailers optimize their digital channels, enhance website and app performance, boost staff productivity and satisfaction, and ultimately provide an exceptional experience, no matter the end-user.

Optimizing IT infrastructure

The more technology, the more complexity. Maintaining a robust and agile IT infrastructure is vital for retailers to support their operations effectively–but managing a highly complex IT environment can be challenging, especially when it comes to identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks.

The Riverbed Unified Observability Platform offers a holistic approach to IT infrastructure monitoring. By analyzing the performance of network infrastructure, servers, and databases, it enables retailers to detect and diagnose issues in real-time, reducing outages and guaranteeing uninterrupted operations. This proactive monitoring and troubleshooting capability allows IT teams to resolve problems before they impact critical systems or disrupt the customer experience.

As the retail landscape continues to evolve, retailers must embrace innovative solutions to overcome challenges and stay competitive. By leveraging Riverbed’s monitoring and analytics capabilities, retailers can transform their businesses and thrive in the dynamic retail landscape of today and tomorrow. Get in touch with us today to learn more, view our retail infographic for more interesting DEX survey findings or visit our retail website page.

Retailers like you need to follow the 90% planning to accelerate digital experience adoption and implementation, seeking out advanced tools that provide real-time insights, enable proactive monitoring, and empower data-driven decision-making. Especially when preparing for a busier Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Singles Day, where you’ll undoubtedly see traffic explode.

In simple terms, this means implementing unified observability solutions: the tools that give you a complete picture of every process, system, and level of the technology stack in simple-to-read, easy-to-understand dashboards. Ninety-two percent of retail survey respondents agree there must be greater investment in unified observability solutions that provide actionable insights for better employee and customer digital experiences.

This is where Riverbed’s unified observability product suite can help. Here’s five of many ways in which it can:

Support real-time performance monitoring

Customer expectations have never been higher–and your competitors have never been in easier reach. That’s why it’s more important than ever that your digital infrastructure performs flawlessly, delivering the exceptional digital experiences consumers demand.

Riverbed provides real-time performance monitoring, enabling retailers to promptly track and optimize their systems. One organization using Riverbed improved page load time by 30%, leading to a 32% rise in customer engagement (that is, the number of customers completing transactions).

Enhance customer satisfaction

It’s impossible to meet customers where they are without… well, knowing where they are. Gaining a deep insight into customer interactions and behaviour allows you to see what shoppers want, need and value the most; where things are going right; and where experiences could be improved.

By analyzing user journey data, optimizing website flows, and personalizing experiences, retailers can meet and exceed customer expectations, leading to improved brand loyalty and higher customer retention rates. In fact, our retail customers have experienced up to a 30% increase in customer satisfaction scores.

Reduce mean time to repair

There’s little more that’s frustrating or costly than downtime and performance issues. But having intelligent monitoring capabilities enables proactive issue detection and resolution. Don’t just take it from us either, the Head of IT Operations at our customer Halkbank said: “With automated alerts, mean time to resolution is almost at zero. We can see an anomaly as it happens and resolve it before it impacts service. This actionable insight ensures optimum performance and a great customer experience.”

By proactively identifying and addressing performance bottlenecks, retailers can maximize revenue opportunities and provide uninterrupted service to their customers–moving from reactive to proactive problem-solving.

Optimize store operations

Your success depends on the efficiency of your store, both online and in your brick-and-mortar branches. Research shows that in 2023, the omni-channel retail experience is in high demand, especially as holiday shoppers skate between sites, apps, and physical stores to purchase gifts and goodies. This has made IT more complex for retailers as they scramble to provide the same premier service across every touchpoint. But unified observability can make things simpler and smoother; 98% of retail leaders agree it’s important (58% say critically important) to stay competitive and deliver seamless user experiences.

Riverbed helps retailers monitor and optimize various aspects of operations, including point-of-sale (POS) systems, inventory management, and employee productivity. This allows retailers to enhance the overall shopping experience and drive profitability while boosting employee satisfaction and freeing up staff members’ time to work on more strategic tasks or complete training. This would be particularly useful, given that 39% of retail survey leaders believe they’re understaffed, while 38% have enough employees but not enough with the key skills to do their jobs.

Empower data-driven decision-making

Data-driven decision-making is a competitive advantage in the retail industry. Riverbed equips retailers with powerful analytics, user journey data and reporting features, so they can make informed decisions, optimize business strategies, and stay ahead of the competition.

In an anonymous, impartial Gartner Peer Spot review, one of our customers told us: “Riverbed enables us to see exactly what users see as they engage with applications. So rather than the user complaining, we get to know in advance and will see what the hiccups are. We can correlate the user experience. It makes troubleshooting easy.”

In short, Riverbed’s unified observability product suite is a game-changer for the retail industry, equipping businesses with the tools to transform their performance and drive success. Offering real-time performance monitoring, enhanced customer satisfaction, proactive issue resolution, optimized store operations, and data-driven decision-making, it truly revolutionizes how retailers operate.

Get in touch with our team today, and let’s chat about how Riverbed can empower the experience for your retail business.

In our 2023 Global Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Survey, which polled 1,800 global IT and business decision-makers across 10 countries and seven industries, we found that 98% of FSI leaders agreed that delivering an exceptional DEX is essential to remain competitive, with 62% describing it as ‘critically important.’

With a continuous influx of data from various sources, from online banking and ATMs to call centers and retail branches, and data scattered across siloed systems, it’s impossible to manually monitor each transaction and identify issues (or successes). Not to mention, this manual data review also incurs significant costs, both in terms of money and productivity.

Matters are made even harder when long-standing employees leave or retire, taking years or sometimes decades of knowledge with them. The Millennial and Gen Z workers filling their roles won’t stand for inefficient processes or outdated tech, either; they are digital natives accustomed to using the best tools for the job. Failure to meet their expectations may result in a costly and time-consuming hiring loop and a significant skills shortage.

But don’t just take it from us–the FSI leaders we surveyed believe 69% of employees would consider leaving the company if adequate DEX was not provided, and 68% say failing to meet digital expectations would disrupt operations, affecting reputation, productivity, and organizational performance. Plus, if you’re anything like the 84% of FSI decision-makers we surveyed who’ve acknowledged the increasing relevance of IT within the C-suite, you’ve undoubtedly taken a more prominent role in the boardroom over the last few years. This has been accelerated as the pandemic has pushed the world towards hybrid working, and tech and data have started to be seen as a strategic driver. With these challenges, the responsibility falls on IT leaders to answer to the broader business.

This is where unified observability solutions come into play: intelligent tools that can liberate you from the complexities of your infrastructure, reduce risk, enhance your reputation, cut costs, and retain your most valuable talent. Unified observability is already considered essential in the industry; 94% of FSI leaders in our survey believe that greater investment in unified observability solutions, providing actionable insights for better employee and customer digital experiences, is necessary. Riverbed’s Unified Observability product suite is differentiated and unique in the industry.

Here’s how you can use this technology to empower exceptional digital experiences for everyone across every touchpoint:

Diagnose problems in the customer journey

It can be tough to look forward when you’re constantly fighting fires. This is something that one of Turkey’s largest and longest-established banks, Halkbank, was all too familiar with. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and customers began using more digital channels overnight, the organization’s mobile banking platform needed to scale to handle more than double the volume of traffic–growing from one million mobile customers to 2.5 million in a short timeframe.

“If mobile banking went down for even a few hours, customers wouldn’t be able to access their accounts or process transactions,” explains Namık Kemal Uçkan, Head of IT Operations at Halkbank. “Our goal is to provide 100% availability for all services, so we need a solution that helps us be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to network management.”

Today, the bank uses Riverbed’s Network Observability solution to monitor critical services across its network and data center through Riverbed Portal, which consolidates and displays data in user-friendly dashboards. It identifies any performance issues across over 40 business-critical applications, before these impact end-users.

Examine user trends

As well as proactively pointing out problems, powerful unified observability solutions like Riverbed’s will examine trends like transaction types and patterns, seek out lengthy processes employees or customers are having to follow, and create shortcuts automatically. So, not only can everyone enjoy the peace of mind that your systems will always work, but they can also rest assured that they’ll work in the quickest, easiest and most logical way, saving them time and you money.

What’s more, having visibility of these trends allows you to work more strategically and make smarter decisions, driven by data–knowing which areas of the business to invest more in and which to scale back, without the usual associated risk. As a simple example, if fewer customers in a certain locale are using ATMs and more are opting to head into a branch, you can remove underused machines and divert their maintenance costs to hiring more in-store staff or offering additional in-person services.

This doesn’t just apply to hardware, either. Riverbed’s unified observability tools provide a unique perspective on users’ actual application usage. That means you can find underutilized licenses and software and reclaim or uninstall where you see fit, saving a considerable amount of IT costs in the process.

Meet compliance regulations

By troubleshooting poorly performing transactions and flagging potential anomalies, Riverbed’s Unified Observability portfolio will allow you to meet increasingly stringent compliance regulations. They’ll also crawl for suspicious web activity, keeping your people safe while they surf.

This is another feature Halkbank put into action, as Uçkan explains, “We were excited to use new features such as SSL certificate monitoring to help keep data secure when browsing the web.”

Identify the slowest machines in your fleet

In our recent research, 88% of FSI leaders say slow-running systems and applications, plus outdated technology, are directly impacting the growth and performance of their organization. Yet often, in businesses of all kinds, hardware is replaced based on how long it’s been in operation rather than by how well it’s working. ATMs are no exception, and neither are the many machines you no doubt use at head office.

The best unified observability solutions will analyze your physical tech’s speed and efficiency, including transaction performance, so you can update and replace where it’s truly needed. This cuts waste and gives employees and customers a consistent and reliable experience. The same principle applies where software is concerned. Riverbed’s Aternity Digital Experience Management solutions can cost-justify and measure the impact of strategic IT projects like cloud mobility and data-center transformation, along with routine changes like OS and application upgrades.

In conclusion, if you’re looking to optimize your hybrid infrastructure while ensuring fast, agile and secure delivery of any application, over any network, to users anywhere, explore our website to learn more about Riverbed’s Unified Observability product suite.

The good news: today, thanks to Digital Experience, there’s no need to compromise. Riverbed Aternity is a Digital Experience Management solution that:

• Measures and analyzes what’s going on with your IT suite–at a granular level, according to your unique setup and needs.
• Facilitates non-invasive remote operation, intelligent automation, and self-healing–so you can focus on what really matters.
• Provides detailed, data-driven insight and analysis–empowering you to make informed decisions.
• Shows genuine, meaningful in-year savings–while making life easier for every single user.

Here are five ways you can use Riverbed Aternity to keep everyone working seamlessly and cut costs, and your carbon footprint, while you’re at it.

Supercharge productivity with reliable services

So often, organizations struggle to stay efficient due to poor-performing IT systems, and plug the gap by hiring more staff, buying more machines, or otherwise overspending.

The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust was wasting 947 hours a year dealing with blue screens across devices, problems with applications, and PCs running slowly. These situations would regularly go unreported, as clinicians were under pressure and focused on critical medical tasks. Without quick and easy access to the data they needed, healthcare workers were spending less time with patients and collaborating with other specialists–like GPs, mental health teams and social care professionals.

Meanwhile, one insurance company we worked with experienced productivity issues in its call center. Crashes, hangs and freezes meant customers were constantly cut off, and then had to wait up to 30 minutes to speak to someone again. So, the business employed more agents in an effort to minimize waiting times (and angry phone calls). This came at tremendous cost.

With Riverbed Aternity, you can pinpoint exactly when, where, and how frequently issues occur, and remedy them without needing to be told or waiting for things to go seriously wrong.

In fact, an international energy solutions company saved 2,000 employee hours using the solution to introduce proactive interventions. By making your people more productive, you can save money and their patience, leading to unexpected benefits like improved employee retention (which cuts recruitment and training costs as well). It’s a win-win.

 Cut the volume of support tickets and the time to resolve them 

IT support is another area that can drain financial resources, and your operators’ job satisfaction. After all, there’s a cost associated with tickets–generally averaging $100 or more each–and your team is the one that has to pay.

As Riverbed Aternity can proactively detect and address problems, it can drive an impressive reduction in not just the number of tickets you receive, but also the amount of them solved at Level 1–and the time in which it takes to close them altogether. Plus, because the tool gives insight remotely, IT staff don’t have to disturb users for their IP address or a breakdown of what they were doing on their computer when, saving everybody precious time and effort.

A multinational consumer goods company saw a 20% reduction in support tickets year-on-year after deploying the solution. Using that same proactive approach it was also able to detect when employees were away from their computers for long periods with their devices still on–like on breaks or overnight–shutting them down remotely and raking back an unbelievable $1.8 million a year to not only save the company $$ but make a strong contribution to their carbon footprint reduction objectives.

Energy company EDF used Riverbed Aternity in a similar way–checking when users last restarted their machines, sending them emails prompting them to do so if it had been a few days, and rebooting remotely if necessary. This helped keep hardware healthy, improved its stability, and reduced the number of support tickets received.

Break down the barriers to innovation

Innovation is another essential that comes with a price, and a risk. From upgrading hardware and amending application access to introducing virtualization and SaaS, you’re likely always looking ahead to the next useful technology. But that tech is only helpful if it works, and sometimes, it doesn’t. As you discover when real users find issues with the tool, and it’s too late to backtrack.

With Riverbed Aternity, you can test changes with those real users in a much safer way, creating small pilot groups before deciding whether or not to roll out updates to the masses. You can also see a clear baseline for performance before, during and after deployment, gaining an accurate picture of its effects, both positive and negative.

Take stock of your software licenses

Are all your staff using all your available software, all the time? License costs can add up, even if the applications themselves go unused. By implementing Riverbed Aternity, you can monitor the precise amount of time users spend on different software, and exactly what they use it for.

Perhaps employees only need the online version of a package you’re paying for on desktop devices. Maybe they don’t need certain tools at all. There’s only one way to find out, and once you do, you’ll be surprised how much you can save by downgrading or deleting unwanted solutions.

This was certainly the case for global food and beverage supplier Tate & Lyle. Using Riverbed Aternity, the company was able to allocate the correct number of software licenses to its user community, benefitting from a fantastic return on investment.

Refresh your hardware smarter, not sooner

Typically, organizations buy hardware with three- or four-year warranties. Once this time’s up, the machines are replaced. It’s expected, it’s planned for, and it’s written into your budget. But does it make sense?

Riverbed Aternity allows you to break free from this one-size-fits-all age-based approach. It constantly assesses whether devices still provide the optimal user experience, even after three or four years. When they do, less money is wasted on new hardware, and less tech ends up in landfill. When they don’t, they can be replaced–before the point that problems set in. Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust, for example, used our solution to save a remarkable 42% of their devices this way.

Now it’s your turn. To learn more about Riverbed and Aternity, get in touch with our friendly team here. We look forward to supporting you in driving your budget-boosting, experience-enhancing IT transformation.