The new Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Digital Employee Experience Tools (DEX) has been published and Riverbed is honored to be recognized as a Leader in the report.

Digital employee experience is crucial today and we believe this placement reflects our vision to transform employee experiences, while optimizing performance, increasing productivity, and maximizing investments in critical business applications and employee devices. 

Delivering exceptional digital experience is not about keeping up—it is about staying ahead. Gartner has recognized Riverbed based on its Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute.

Embracing the future of Digital Employee Experience (DEX) 

In today’s digital-first world, the importance of Digital Employee Experience (DEX) cannot be overstated. Organizations rely on technology to drive business outcomes, like AI (Artificial Intelligence), cloud solutions, and unified observability, to ensure a seamless, efficient, and positive digital experiences for employees. Our Riverbed Global DEX Survey shows 92% of IT leaders say unified observability is important for competitiveness and delivering a seamless DEX. 

Digital Employee Experience refers to the sum of all interactions an employee has with digital tools, applications, and platforms they use in their work environments as well as how they feel about their IT service. This includes everything from the responsiveness of their devices to the ease of accessing critical software applications, to overall performance and reliability of the IT infrastructure, as well as measuring employee sentiment through surveys.

According to our Global DEX Survey, business and IT leaders say investing in DEX is among their top priorities for the next five years, meaning DEX is no longer a luxury but a necessity. 

DEX is critical for the modern enterprise 

Productivity: Employees depend on digital tools to perform their jobs. This is especially true for frontline workers, who rely on these tools and mobile devices to engage with customers. Slow or unreliable technology can disrupt workflows, leading to delays. By investing in DEX, organizations can ensure that all employees have the tools they need to perform their best. 

Employee Satisfaction: A seamless and efficient digital experience contributes significantly to employee satisfaction. When employees can effortlessly navigate their digital environments, they are more likely to feel valued and supported by their organization. 

Attracting and Retaining Talent: In a competitive job market, offering superior experience can be a differentiator in attracting and retaining top talent. Modern employees expect their work environment to be technologically advanced and user-friendly.

Cost Efficiency: Addressing DEX issues proactivity can prevent larger IT problems, reducing downtime and support costs. A well-managed digital environment minimizes the need for extensive training and reduces the likelihood of errors. 

Business Continuity: In an increasingly remote and hybrid work world maintaining a high-quality DEX ensures business continuity. Employees must be able to access critical systems and applications from any location, at any time, without disruption. 

The role of Riverbed Aternity in enhancing DEX 

At Riverbed, our AI-automation driven platform places the end user at the center to optimize digital experience. Riverbed Aternity is the DEX component of the Riverbed platform, empowering organizations to resolve digital experiences swiftly & optimize costs by applying advanced ML & AI to the broadest range of telemetry across all IT domains. 

Aternity provides detailed insights into the performance of applications and devices, including mobile Android and iOS devices, from the end users’ perspective. This end-to-end visibility enables IT to identify and resolve performance issues before they impact employees, ensuring a seamless digital experience. We also measure the actual experience of every employee, and how they feel about their IT service with the actual application and device.

With Aternity, IT teams can proactivity detect and address potential problems before they escalate into major disruptions, ensuring employees can work without interruption and our AI-data driven analytics provide IT and business leaders with the data needed to make informed decisions about technology investments, resource allocation, and process improvements. Because Aternity measures the actual sentiment of employees, organizations can make strategic decisions to enhance DEX by understanding the impact of their digital tools on employee performance.

Aternity understands that investing in DEX is not just about enhancing technology, but creating a work environment where employees can thrive, innovate, and contribute to the organization’s success. With solutions like Aternity, organizations can make sure employees have a consistent and reliable digital experience, regardless of their location and ensure the full potential of their workforce

We invite you to download a complimentary copy of the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Employee Experience Tools (DEX) and see why we are evaluated among other DEX vendors.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 

Global IT organizations are still recovering, and it could take weeks to fully recover. This incident underscores the critical importance of Observability and Digital Experience Management (DEM) solutions in today’s interconnected world. DEM solutions can provide immense value during global IT outages like the recent CrowdStrike incident.

Key benefits of DEM solutions during global IT outages

During an outage, clear communication with users is crucial. Organizations need to quickly detect and respond to issues to resolve the downtime and disruption. DEM solutions capture user interactions and performance metrics to allow organizations to keep users informed about service statuses and expected resolution times.

By offering insights into system performance and user behavior, DEM solutions help build more resilient IT infrastructures with comprehensive reporting enabling organizations to understand the impact of outages and improve future response strategies, providing valuable data for post-incident analysis and continuous improvement.

Riverbed Aternity: A vital tool for managing global outages

Riverbed Aternity is a prime example of a DEM solution that can be invaluable during global IT outages. The past few days, many customers have been using Aternity to gain visibility of the impact from the CrowdStrike incident, which has enabled organizations to take prescriptive actions to fix problems faster and mitigate this situation.

Aternity swiftly helped customers identify which applications and servers across the enterprise were affected and determined whether the issues were escalating or subsiding. This visibility let

IT teams quickly confirm which systems were back to normal, ensuring a smooth and efficient recovery process. Here are a few ways Aternity can help in these types of incidents:

1. Real-Time Monitoring: Aternity provides real-time monitoring of user experiences and application performance. This can help organizations quickly identify and diagnose issues affecting their systems and devices.
2. Incident Management: With its detailed analytics and insights, Aternity can assist IT teams in pinpointing the root causes of outages and performance degradation, enabling faster resolution.
3. User Experience Insights: By understanding how the outage impacts end-users, organizations can prioritize critical issues and ensure that essential services are restored first.
4. Proactive Alerts: Aternity’s proactive alerting system can notify IT teams of potential issues before they escalate, helping to mitigate the impact of the outage.
5. Comprehensive Reporting: Detailed reports and dashboards provide visibility into the performance and availability of applications and services, aiding in post-incident analysis and future prevention strategies.

Aternity ensures consistent performance, availability, and continuous operation, even during large-scale disruptions. These capabilities make Riverbed Aternity a powerful ally in managing and mitigating the effects of a widespread IT outage.

Aternity’s ability to track and monitor critical errors

By tracking and monitoring instances of the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on Windows devices, Aternity helps IT teams identify and troubleshoot the root causes of these critical system errors, ensuring better stability and performance for end-users.

Aternity tracks BSOD events by monitoring the health and performance of Windows devices in real-time through the following process:

• Agent Installation: A small agent is installed on each monitored device, collecting data on system performance, application usage, and errors, including BSOD events.
• Event Logging: When a BSOD occurs, the agent logs the event details, such as the error code, timestamp, and relevant system information.
• Data Transmission: The collected data is sent to Aternity’s central server, where it is aggregated and analyzed.
• Dashboard and Alerts: IT teams can view BSOD events on Aternity’s dashboard, which provides visualizations and detailed reports. Alerts can also be configured to notify IT staff immediately when a BSOD occurs.
• Root Cause Analysis: Aternity helps identify patterns and potential root causes of BSOD events by correlating them with other system and application performance data.

This comprehensive approach allows IT teams to quickly identify and address the underlying issues causing BSODs, improving overall system stability and user experience.

Assisting with remediation during outages

For those already using Aternity, the impact of software upgrades, such as the CrowdStrike Sensor Platform and CrowdStrike Windows Sensor from version 7.14.18408.0 to 7.14.18410.0, can be closely monitored. IT teams can run remediation scripts to resolve issues, such as:

1. Booting Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment.
2. Navigating to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory.
3. Locating and deleting the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”.
4. Booting the host normally.

In conclusion, the recent CrowdStrike global outage has highlighted the critical importance of Digital Experience Management solutions. Solutions like Riverbed Aternity provide the real-time insights, proactive alerts, and comprehensive reporting needed to manage and mitigate the effects of widespread IT disruptions effectively. As organizations continue to recover, investing in robust DEM solutions will be key to building more resilient IT infrastructures and maintaining service continuity in the face of future challenges.

Given the popularity of Teams, Microsoft has significantly enhanced it with the rollout of Teams 2.0, now generally available. Teams 2.0 promises to be faster, more efficient, and more user-friendly than its predecessor. As organizations migrate to the latest version of Teams, the question arises: how do you ensure a successful rollout across potentially thousands of endpoints while maintaining service quality? The answer lies in AI-driven automation.

Riverbed is a leader in unified observability, and our Aternity solution provides intelligent automation and AI-driven insights into digital experiences for employees and customers across all endpoints and devices. The introduction of Aternity’s Intelligent Service Desk has been a gamechanger, enabling organizations to dramatically reduce service desk tickets and enhance employee satisfaction. In fact, these capabilities played a crucial role in Riverbed’s successful migration from Slack to Teams 2.0.

Below, let us explore our own use case. 

Embracing digital transformation with real world impact

Like many organizations today, Riverbed’s IT team faces increasing incident volumes and complexity. Coupled with a dispersed, multi-geographical, hybrid workforce, it becomes challenging for IT to schedule time to meet with employees.

Riverbed has adopted the strategic approach of a “shift-left service desk,” focusing on real people, real devices, and real-life scenarios. This strategy ensures the best employee experience during any digital transformation by empowering end users and allowing IT to focus on higher support tiers while eliminating mundane tasks.

Riverbed made the business decision to migrate to Microsoft Teams 2.0 based on its enhanced speed, efficiency, and user-friendliness. With a more streamlined migration experience, Riverbed aimed to make the user experience equally seamless. 

Riverbed Aternity Intelligent Service Desk provides AI-enabled detection, troubleshooting, and logic-driven remediation without human intervention. This puts the employee in the driver seat by allowing them to run their own remediation scripts. With this core capability, Riverbed was able to successfully auto detect any issues employees might be facing while undergoing the migration. 

Simplifying IT intervention with a step-by-step approach

Riverbed’s IT team has seen tremendous value in automating the discovery of issues, thereby preventing resource bottlenecks. The process is straightforward:

1. Identify which employees are experiencing issues with Teams 2.0.
2. Generate a pop-up alert for these employees.
3. Allow employees to execute a runbook script.

The most common issue with the migration to Teams 2.0 was the need to clear the Teams Cache, which could grow to several gigabytes. By identifying who was having an issue, Riverbed could automatically send a pop-up to suggest clearing the cache. If the user selected “yes,” the remediation would run to clear the cache and restart Teams—all within 20 seconds. This procedure was fine-tuned to avoid running if the employee was in an active Teams meeting, thereby enhancing the overall experience and minimizing disruptions.

To date, 63% of Riverbed employees who encountered an issue with Teams 2.0 successfully executed the remediation, leading to fewer IT tickets and less troubleshooting required by the user.

Microsoft provides a variety of management tools for Teams, including Call Analytics, Call Quality Dashboard, and more. With its integration to Teams, Aternity provides similar capabilities, but also enables IT to resolve other troubleshooting issues, such as those caused by anti-virus software, rogue processes, or by the performance of peripherals such as headsets. In addition, capabilities within Aternity—like automated remediation, employee sentiment, and DXI—apply equally to Teams as they do for any other business critical application. 

Aternity prioritizes Teams like a business-critical application—because it is!

This real-life example underscores the value that Riverbed Aternity brings to customers using the Microsoft 365 portfolio. The Aternity agent proactively identifies user experience and performance issues, reducing costs and improving service by empowering the user to decide when to run the remediation.

Common use cases include:

• Service Desk: Measure actual employee experience—do users experience issues across all apps, or just with Teams?
• End User Services: Reduce problem MTTR by correlating Teams call quality with the performance of the underlying device.
• Teams Owner: Gain cross-company insights—compare your Teams performance to the market to identify areas for improvement.
• IT Executives: Focus on continuous improvement—determine where to invest for the greatest impact by tailoring targets against market benchmarks.

Riverbed Aternity enhances Microsoft’s monitoring capabilities by providing actual employee experience for every application in the portfolio. Aternity monitors end user experience for every enterprise application on any physical, virtual, or mobile device.

Download the Aternity solution brief to learn more about how Digital Experience Management can rapidly troubleshoot and validate changes in Microsoft Office, Windows, and Teams.