Expanding Generation Y Workforce Raises the Bar for Application and Network Performance

Research by InfoVista and BT reveals the need for better network governance tools to accommodate an increasingly demanding and digitally-savvy workforce

PARIS & HERNDON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--InfoVista, the leading provider of network performance orchestration solutions for a better connected and collaborative world, today released the results of a new benchmark report: Meeting the Network Demands of Changing Generations. The report was jointly conducted with BT, one of the world’s leading providers of communications services and solutions, and highlights the challenges IT departments face in managing the ever-increasing expectations of a new generation of workers.

The survey of nearly 300 senior information and communications technology (ICT) managers and decision makers across public and private enterprises shows that today’s workforce is unsatisfied with network performance overall. Ninety percent of respondents have received complaints related to application performance from a workforce increasingly dominated by Generation Y¹. Generation Y represent more than one in three workers in the United States.

This new generation’s affinity with the digital world, high expectations of technology and usage of network-hungry business applications has given way to a hyper-connected, collaborative and communicative workplace. As a result, businesses are under greater pressure to maintain ever-higher standards of application and network performance.

Ensuring network and application performance expectations often fall to the responsibility of the ICT department. Of those surveyed, 94 percent agreed that the corporate network has become more critical. Yet, only around half of organizations have insight into which applications could have a negative impact on the performance of the corporate network (51 percent) or have IT governance in place for application performance (57 percent).

The report establishes a clear need for a governance approach to guarantee application performance and manage the user experience. In addition to implementing governance and tools to measure and predict performance (64 percent), many survey respondents also highlighted hybrid wide-area network (WAN) deployments (47 percent) and moving more applications to the cloud while outsourcing SLAs (45 percent) as the best ways to make the most of the corporate network, and simultaneously keep costs low.

Supporting Quotes:

• “The ever-increasing Generation Y workforce is turning the workplace on its head – not only shaping culture and front-end operations, but also the supportive network infrastructures,” said Sylvain Quartier, SVP products and markets strategy, InfoVista. “As this new workforce creates increasingly high demand for more applications and better network performance, IT departments must go the extra mile to ensure their talent is not disgruntled or unproductive. This could come to bear on businesses’ own revenue and customer satisfaction. Assuring this requires IT departments use highly-visible and accurate, often round-the-clock application performance management solutions that could measure and predict service outages and degradations at any given time.”
• “Continual capacity upgrades is not the answer. Instead, with a governance approach to managing the user experience, ICT has a view of individual applications on the network and can prioritize as necessary,” said Ricardo Belmar, senior director, enterprise product marketing, InfoVista. “And, to truly take a proactive approach to guaranteeing application performance, businesses should also consider a hybrid WAN. By combining the enterprise WAN with high-speed Internet broadband, cloud-based traffic can be directly routed via the Internet. This ensures Generation Y employees and others remain productive because the applications they need to do their job are constantly available via the best network connection.”

Other key findings of the report include:

• The initiatives posing the greatest application performance challenges include working with cloud applications in general (55%), bring your own device and applications (42%), and video conferencing and multimedia services (40%)
• More organizations measure end user satisfaction (61%) than have IT governance in place for application performance (57%)
• To deliver application performance and measure user experience, the most popular tools include standard network tools provided by infrastructure vendors (64%), a service management system (54%) and an application performance management system (39%)
• Piloting is the most popular way to predict the impact of new applications on network performance (41%), followed by information from the supplier (23%). Twenty percent cannot predict the impact at all

¹Generation Y are the demographic cohort following Generation X ranging in birth years from circa 1980 to 2000.

Resources

• Download our benchmark report, Meeting the Network Demands of Changing Generations, and check out our infographic to learn more about the expectations of the Generation Y workforce and how IT can help businesses meet them.
• Find out how InfoVista delivers the most innovative and comprehensive automated solutions to guarantee application performance across enterprises’ large and complex networks.
• Download InfoVista's whitepaper, Guarantee Application Performance over Hybrid WAN, for more of InfoVista's views on hybrid WAN.
• Follow and engage with InfoVista on its blog, “ProActive Network News,” and on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter.
• Learn BT’s analysis of the Meeting the Network Demands of Changing Generations benchmark report on its Let’s Talk Point of View page, and by connecting with BT on LinkedIn or Twitter.

About InfoVista

InfoVista is the leading provider of cost-effective network performance orchestration solutions for a better connected and collaborative world. Our award-winning solutions empower communications service providers and large enterprises to ensure a high-quality user experience by achieving optimal network performance and guaranteeing business-critical application performance. InfoVista’s expertise and innovations provide a new level of actionable network, application and customer intelligence, visibility and control across all services, all technologies, and all domains of both the fixed and mobile networks. Using our solutions, eighty percent of the world's largest service providers and leading global enterprises deliver high-performing and differentiated services, plan and optimize networks to match application and service demands, and streamline network operations while keeping total cost of ownership as low as possible. For more information, please visit www.infovista.com.