How Riverbed’s Unified Application Performance and End-User Experience Monitoring Helps You Grow Your Business

With the latest SteelCentral release, Riverbed has delivered unified licensing for End User Experience Monitoring (EUEM) and Application Performance Monitoring (APM). This enables partners running SteelCentral SaaS to seamlessly shift their monitoring tactics to keep up with their customers’ needs. Doing so provides a variety of business benefits to partners. This article explains how unified licensing works and how Riverbed partners can take advantage of those business benefits.

If apps are truly business-critical, why is there a gap in APM coverage?

Most companies today are launching into some form of digital transformation project to drive new revenue streams, improve customer service, raise workforce productivity, and improve relationships with partners. Those initiatives won’t work unless customers, employees, and partners have positive experiences with the business-critical applications on which they rely.

Yet the reality is that, according to the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Management (APM), companies use APM products on only 5 percent of business-critical apps, mostly focusing instead on web and mobile platforms. Why? Cost and complexity have something to do with it. This low coverage presents a significant risk to these companies. And a significant opportunity for managed service providers, system integrators, and other Riverbed partners with practices built on SteelCentral Aternity and SteelCentral AppInternals.

Apps no longer left out

Left out of the conversation are thick client apps like SAP, or apps that are run on point of sale devices. Today’s companies have hundreds, if not thousands, of business critical apps. So IT should worry about the digital experience of all types of apps that run in the enterprise: like CRM apps used in call centers, or electronic health record apps deployed on the tablets of nurses and doctors.

Here’s the big news: Riverbed has enhanced the SteelCentral suite to address the other 95 percent of your application portfolio.

The unification of APM and EUEM

The latest release of SteelCentral introduces a SaaS-delivered, unified EUEM and APM solution that helps IT understand the performance every app on users’ experience. With SteelCentral SaaS, a unified licensing program enables customers and partners to seamlessly provision both EUEM and APM monitoring of your business critical apps as circumstances dictate. This release builds on the integration between SteelCentral Aternity EUEM and SteelCentral AppInternals APM.

How does this work? Watch this short video to get the full picture.

Four business benefits of unified EUEM and APM licensing

With unified licensing, SteelCentral SaaS enables customers to deploy monitoring capability wherever it’s needed – end user devices or back-end application components.

Having a single SKU for SaaS-based End User Experience Monitoring and APM provides a variety of benefits to service providers.

1. Align your monitoring service portfolio with the dynamic changes in your customers’ IT environments

Digital transformation means constant change in your customers’ IT environments. Companies expand to new geographic locations and open new branch offices. Or they consolidate data centers for economies of scale. Or, the opposite. They acquire rivals and close branch offices. They open new data centers for geographic redundancy or proximity. No matter what the case, a unified licensing model for EUEM and APM enables you to keep pace. You can shift the mix of your monitoring service portfolio between end user devices and back-end application components as the underlying infrastructure shifts. You’ll retain revenue and your customer base, even as these changes cause their monitoring requirements to shift.

2. Maintain your managed services revenue even when customers migrate to SaaS

If you offer a managed application service, you depend on the ability to instrument your customer’s apps, whether they run in your customer’s data center, your own, or a 3^rd party hosting provider. When companies migrate their business critical applications to SaaS, you’re at risk for being left behind. Your managed application service relies on your ability to instrument the apps with APM agents. But you can’t instrument 3^rd party SaaS apps that you don’t control.

A unified licensing model between EUEM and APM enables you to maintain visibility into the performance of SaaS-delivered apps. Rather than instrument the apps on the back-end application infrastructure, you can monitor application performance from where it really counts – the end user’s device. With an agent on the end user’s device, IT can monitor the performance of applications, as they render on the screen. Doing so not only maintains your managed services revenue stream, but it enables you to build trust and add value to your customers by holding SaaS vendors accountable to your customer’s performance expectations.

3. Maximize your investment in management

There’s no more shelf-ware with a unified End User Experience Monitoring and APM licensing model. Service providers can deploy un-used agents to where they need them most – end user devices or back-end application components. And vice-versa. According to Gartner (2018 APM Magic Quadrant), enterprises use APM on only 5% of business critical applications, so there are plenty of apps to be monitored as part of your managed application service.

4. Simplify vendor and managed service provider management

A unified licensing approach for EUEM and APM takes the benefits of a having a single vendor, or managed service provider to a whole new level. Rather than interacting two separate vendors, as a Riverbed service provider now you can switch monitoring capabilities seamlessly within SteelCentral SaaS. This streamlines administrative tasks like vendor management, ordering, provisioning, and support.

Get started today!

Learn more about how Riverbed is reinventing APM for the digital era by watching this on-demand global webcast.

If you’re a partner who currently uses the SaaS version of SteelCentral Aternity, you can read this Help article on unified licensing on how to get started. If you’re not yet offering SteelCentral as part of your managed service portfolio, you can get started with End User Experience Monitoring by registering for the Aternity free trial today. Or you can start with Application Performance Monitoring by registering for the AppInternals free trial.