Five Universal Perspectives from GITEX Global, the World’s Biggest Tech Event

From October 16-20, Riverbed was proud to exhibit at GITEX Global, the world’s biggest tech show, held at the prestigious Dubai World Trade Centre. This year’s theme, ‘The Year to Imagine AI in Everything,’ set the stage for innovative discussions around groundbreaking technologies. Our primary goal for participating in this event was to empower organizations in attendance to deliver exceptional digital experiences with industry-leading Unified Observability and Acceleration solutions.

To achieve this, we engaged in enlightening conversations with IT leaders from businesses spanning countless industries. Whether they were energetic start-ups or established multi-million-dollar enterprises, what struck us most was that their fundamental challenges and priorities were the same.

With that in mind, these are our top five takeaways from the event, shedding light on the key insights and trends that emerged:

1. End-user experience is key

When your competitors are just a click away, the one thing that’ll universally, unequivocally set you apart – and drive true business and revenue growth–is the end-user experience. By that, we don’t simply mean the customer experience, but that of your employees, too. After all, keeping staff is just as important and valuable as building brand loyalty and advocacy externally.

However, it can be difficult to see the full picture of how satisfied your workforce and customer base are when you don’t have insight into their everyday experiences, pain points, and journeys. Sure, you can analyze small data samples to see how things are going, but that’s hardly representative. Sending out surveys to gauge sentiment isn’t the most productive move, either; by the time you’ve gathered feedback, it’s too late, and people have already made up their minds about you and your services.

2. Throwing money at it just won’t work

A common approach to overcoming this obstacle is making enormous investment in the latest and greatest tech. But even with the most modern, state-of-the-art architecture and the highest bandwidth, the end-user experience can still be subpar. The performance of your applications lies less in their response times, and more in how you define and build the ecosystem that drives them.

That encompasses all levels of the tech stack–and requires you to think about everything from your users, network and infrastructure to your database, storage, and UI. More complexity means more likelihood of failure, and if you can’t pinpoint where that failure’s happening, you can’t fix it. This lack of insight is not only detrimental to your customer experience, but it also creates security and compliance risk, as you can’t see where potential breaches or anomalies are occurring.

3. No two businesses are alike

Sadly, you can’t fix these problems with an off-the-shelf product. Even though your organization may be running the exact same infrastructure and applications as others, your end-user experience–and the behavior of your apps–can be north and south. This is because your workflow and business logic will always be different, and this is no doubt the area on which you spend the majority of your time.

The Covid pandemic has only created more disparity in how companies operate, accelerating the uptake of hybrid working and forcing more IT teams to move their architecture to the cloud. While every business faces the same challenge in empowering their people to work effectively and efficiently from wherever, whenever, the level at which this is possible and encouraged–and the tech and tools that need to be made remotely available–varies massively.

4. The simpler the solution, the better

Things become even more convoluted when the majority of today’s businesses–from huge corporations to small enterprises–have more than five different tools doing either the same job, or with overlapping features. For instance, they may have network traffic monitoring solutions and network devices analyzing things separately, or app and server monitoring platforms working in tandem (but not necessarily together).

With no unification, correlation, or communication between any of these tools, time and investment are wasted, and employees are plagued with alert fatigue as endless notifications pop up and ping. Plus, in the boardroom, when questions are asked–like, “What’s the cause of that issue?”, “Where’s it happening?”, “What’s it impacting?” and “Is just one service or network affected, or all of them?”–leaders can’t give a comprehensive answer.

These silos are brilliant for covering individual teams, or team players, but not for protecting the company’s reputation or revenue. Or leaders from the scrutiny of the wider business.

5. Unified Observability can give you the edge

So, organizations are looking for a simple, connected solution that’ll help them proactively resolve performance issues by providing state-of-the-art monitoring, end-to-end visibility, and intelligent analysis for their critical services across all tiers. That means unified observability–and the smartest of these solutions use AI and machine learning, not just to identify issues but to solve them proactively and automatically.

This includes solutions from Riverbed, which are completely scalable and uniquely tailored to each organization. Riverbed’s tools have been specifically designed to provide the optimum end-user experience by finding and remedying problems at their very root, throughout the entire tech stack–before hardware and software are even rolled out, updated, or upgraded. No more symptomatic alerts creating hassle and headaches.

Moreover, these solutions provide data-driven insight that allows you to look forward and work strategically instead of purely fighting fires. For example, they can find trends and patterns in the end-user journey to create shortcuts that make everyone’s lives easier or assess where machines or licenses are going unused to drive cost efficiencies.

See you next year!

We enjoyed every moment of our week at GITEX. It was a privilege engaging with the leading companies in the region and helping them understand how IT can eliminate data silos and alert fatigue, improve decision-making, and deliver seamless, secure digital experiences with Riverbed. If you missed it, here is a look back at our week:

Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth. If you’d like to connect with our team, book your free, no-obligation one-to-one demo with one of our experts today. We look forward to hearing from you—and seeing you at GITEX 2024.