Application (app) performance acceleration company Riverbed aims to address the significant gap between the expectations and actual performance of business apps, says Riverbed sub-Saharan Africa country manager Wimpie van Rensburg.

The Riverbed Global App Survey found that 21% of businesses indicated that app performances impact daily on their businesses, and that there is a significant gap between the expectations of executives regarding the performance of apps and the benefits realised.

However, apps are not the problem – getting the app-specific data to where it needs to be to support business is the key challenge, says Van Rensburg.

Riverbed’s organisationwide app performance management platform, which includes local controllers and software to accelerate business-app performance, including mobile devices, enables companies to collectively manage and determine the real-time performance of any of the apps the business uses.

“Our platform is used to accelerate app performance in hybrid public–private cloud systems, and Riverbed will provide a software-defined app performance management system during the year, following our acquisition of software-defined wide-area network specialist company Ocedo.”

A typical large company can have about 80 separate apps to manage within a complex hybrid business information technology and networking environment, and these apps have to function regardless of where a user is at the time.

The platform allows for easy identification of underperforming apps and which part of the link is performing poorly or inhibiting performance, and assign alternative routes for data.

Further, Riverbed also has native integration with most of the cloud service providers’ hosting environments and can thus help companies to accelerate the performance of their apps, even if they host their cloud services internationally.

“Riverbed’s focus remains on ensuring that the components of infrastructure perform well, and controlling where data resides and its flow. This enables us to monitor the infrastructure and user experience in real time, identify issues quickly and remediate them proactively to ensure uptime and app performance.

“Large bandwidth connections do not improve quality of performance, and unnecessarily large connections add costs without value. Visibility of apps and their performance across a company’s network is crucial to improving the performance of the business support tools – the apps – and the productivity of employees,” explains Van Rensburg.

Another use of the app performance platform is to support Internet of Things (IoT) projects, since much of the data for IoT apps can also be accelerated using the Riverbed platform, he adds.

Riverbed’s software-defined solution release during the year should further boost its IoT capabilities and enable it to help improve network, app and IoT systems, he concludes.