While a move to remote working was already well underway before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the lockdown has profoundly accelerated the shift. Whatever the ‘new normal’ looks like, remote working will be part of it.
But this comes with a raft of challenges – one of which is that home working can be made unbearably frustrating if you experience slow connections to key applications. The small losses in time quickly add up, impacting productivity and limiting the flexibility teams now need to succeed.
One of the biggest time-losses for employees is tied to slow speeds in business-critical SaaS applications. They are incredibly detrimental to productivity, so much so that research from Zen Internet estimates that employees could be losing as much as 72 minutes of work a day just from slow connections. That is 14 minutes more than the average UK commute takes! For businesses that rely heavily on SaaS platforms, a slow connection can seriously impact business operations and growth.
To illustrate the impact that slow SaaS applications can have, let’s take a look at the film Sliding Doors. The plot follows a story from two alternative perspectives, to explore the idea that one small change can have an enormous impact. We’ll run our experiment using the Riverbed SaaS Accelerator, a software-defined, cloud-based service.
Meet the team
We join Sam and her team putting the finishing touches to a proposal for a new prospect. The prospect has been a long-term target, and this is the final stage of the procurement process. Today is about finalising the presentation and getting it submitted.
Without Riverbed SaaS Accelerator | With Riverbed SaaS Accelerator |
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09:00 - 4 hours to submission | |
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| Sam downloads the presentation and edits from her director, a process that takes several minutes. Sam & team divide up their roles for the submission, downloading additional resources, incurring more delays. | Sam downloads the presentation and edits from her director, a process that takes barely a minute. Sam & team divide up their roles for the submission, downloading additional resources, without delay. |
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| Unexpected Challenge. The marketing team urgently needs help. A team member steps in, but his response is slowed by delays accessing Salesforce and Office 365. Progress is delayed. | Unexpected Challenge. The marketing team urgently needs help. A team member steps in with some key data and promptly re-joins the team to move into final drafting. |
11:00 – 2 hours to submission | |
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| The team agrees to add some proof points to make the proposal more compelling, but this slows progress. The delay means they have missed their slot for the finance team to review the proposal, incurring another delay. | The team agrees to add some proof points to make the proposal more compelling. The draft is ready for sharing with the finance team to proofread and approve the response. |
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| The finance team begin reviewing the proposal, but the delay means they are going to miss the deadline to submit. | The draft is approved and sent to the client. The team begins working on a new pipeline opportunity. |
13:00 - DEADLINE | |
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| The team refines the proposal following the finance team’s feedback but miss a customer call. The proposal is sent to the customer late. The team gives their proposal a 60% chance of success, as it’s missing key data. | The team joins a customer call. They give their proposal an 80% chance of winning. |
Every minute counts
This simple story demonstrates the difference that app performance can make. Thanks to it, the team can make the most of their available connectivity, experiencing a significant boost in speed when accessing SaaS apps – including Office 365 and Salesforce – without any necessary change in their internet bandwidth. These time savings quickly add up and deliver welcome boosts in productivity while creating flexibility for the team to secure more new business. At a time when remote working, resilience and agility are top of the agenda, the benefits of Riverbed’s SaaS Accelerator are especially relevant.
To find out more about how the Riverbed SaaS Accelerator can help businesses perform better:
