5 Key Takeaways from Riverbed’s Global User Conference

Wow—what an event! In keeping with current norms of social distancing and remote work, Riverbed held its first virtual global user conference, and what a day it was! I want to thank everyone who attended and participated. It’s your interaction and knowledge sharing that made the conference a success. Additionally, I need to remind all attendees—and those who didn’t register—that more than 30 sessions and keynote replays from our conference are available on-demand, here.

The Riverbed Global User Conference theme “Maximizing Performance and Visibility for Any User, Network, App, Anywhere” couldn’t have been more timely given the impact the recent pandemic has had on organizations of every kind. With the reality of a work-from-anywhere world, and with it the expanding complexity of the network, the challenges IT teams are facing in our modern, digital era have never been greater.

Uniting subject matter experts from across many domains who all share a passion for delivering the best user experience and productivity for their constituencies, was core to the design of this conference. The SMEs took center stage and didn’t fail to deliver. Sharing the latest knowledge of how you develop a holistic, end-to-end view of exactly what’s happening from the user client—across hybrid networks—and to the cloud was foundational to truly understanding where we are now and where we must go. Building on that knowledge with AI and machine learning to provide actionable insights and forward visibility has become absolutely critical. Leveraging all of the above and providing guidance on how to apply numerous innovations in network and application acceleration—from client to cloud—brought the conversations full circle.

The day-long event was abuzz with energy, but there are five key takeaways that should be reinforced:

1. Every business needs to accelerate its digital journey. Digital transformations were already well underway in 2019. With the new year, came COVID-19, a global pandemic that would challenge our norms and shift digital transformation into overdrive, overnight. IT teams pivoted quickly and responded in herculean fashion and there’s no turning back. The path forward for every operating model—from supply chains to service delivery to crisis management—is clearly to be led by digital transformation.
2. Hybrid and multi-cloud adoption continue to grow rapidly. Collaboration tools and SaaS app usage are up significantly, including Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Slack. For example, Teams grew 70% to 75 million daily users in April, alone. The shift to the cloud continues as organizations move more workloads to IaaS and further adopt SaaS apps.
3. With remote work growing at 50%+ on the heels of the pandemic, flexible work environments are the future. The ‘global experiment’ has made business leaders more comfortable with remote work (95%), and 80% of employees expect more work-from-anywhere flexibility. Overnight, nearly 1.1 billion people were working from home (up from ~350 million in 2019), and more than half of them aren’t returning to the office when the pandemic subsides.
4. End-to-end visibility is required for our work-from-anywhere reality. Digital transformation, the expanding workplace and explosive growth in cloud/SaaS have only magnified the complexity of today’s network and extended the visibility challenge for IT organizations. And, the old adage has never been more appropriate: you can’t control what you don’t see. End-to-end visibility is more critical than ever. Riverbed has helped many of our customers through this time with the tools to provide better visibility across modern, complex networks. View any of the 15 sessions focused on Network and Application Visibility—ranging from a deep dive on packets and flows to machine learning and AI for NetOps and Troubleshooting—on demand, now!
5. Performance must extend from the user client through the network and to the cloud—regardless of your team members’ location. Delivering optimization across the modern network includes acceleration for all environments and infrastructure—on-prem, cloud, SaaS, mobile/client—regardless of where the user is located. Riverbed saw 3x growth initially on Riverbed Client Accelerator, which boosts app performance on laptops for remote workers and approximately 100% QoQ growth in Q3 for our application acceleration solutions that include Client Accelerator and Riverbed SaaS Accelerator, which boosts performance of SaaS apps like O365, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce and ServiceNow. You can view any of the 10 sessions focused on Network and Application Performance—ranging from optimizing encrypted SSL traffic to best practices for O365 acceleration—on demand, now!

The Riverbed Global User Conference clearly reinforced just how valuable our peer experts can be (make sure to view the many great success stories customers shared during the event) and also how passionate the IT community is with respect to providing the best user experience and productivity for their teams.

This is exactly where Riverbed’s been focused for years, with you, and even more so today. Partner with us to help your business or government agency maximize visibility and performance—for any user, network, application. Anywhere your users reside.