U.S. Companies May Be Losing $7.5 Billion of Worker Time Annually

Nimble Storage, Inc. released global survey results revealing the impact application performance delays have on company performance.

The Mind the Gap report, which Nimble Storage produced in collaboration with Oxford Economics, found that delays in propagating and refreshing application data – the app-data gap – can cause significant productivity drains and economic losses.

Based on a calculation derived from the survey results, U.S. companies may be losing as much as $7.5 billion of worker time annually due to delays and downtime.

The report surveyed nearly 3,000 IT professionals and business application users based in the U.S., Germany, U.K., Australia, Singapore and Southeast Asia. Nearly two-thirds of all respondents and 76% of U.S. respondents reported that the speed of applications they use impacts their ability to perform their best in the workplace.

IT professionals, however, don’t appear to be aware of the magnitude of the problems residing within their own companies, allowing the small delays from the app-data gap to add up to big headaches. While more than 40% of business users say they avoid using some software applications at work because they run too slowly, only 18% of IT professionals think their users are either unsatisfied or very unsatisfied with the way software systems work at their companies.

A corresponding report, Can Machine Learning Prevent Application Downtime? analyzes data collected by Nimble Storage and points to the most pertinent hurdles impacting the speed at which companies access the data that powers applications.

Key survey findings:

• U.S. companies may be losing as much as $7.5 billion of worker time annually due to delays and downtime.
• More than 40% of business users avoid using certain applications at work because they run too slowly.
• Nearly three-fourths (71%) of all business users experience some level of delays while accessing software at work, with 28% saying they experience delays “all the time.”
• Over 50% of all respondents say they are less tolerant of delays than they were five years ago

Millennials Experience the Effects of the App-Data Gap Most

• Over three-fourths (77%) of millennials say that sub-optimal application performance affects their ability to achieve their personal best, compared with just half of baby boomers and 72% of Gen Xers.
• Half of millennials surveyed say they’ve stopped using an application because it runs too slowly – more than users in other age groups.
• Over three-fourths (78%) of millennials say they occasionally or constantly experience delays when accessing or inputting information with business software, compared with 60% of baby boomers.

Respondents from the U.S. and Southeast Asia are the most demanding of their technology infrastructures. In the U.S. (76%) and Southeast Asia (73%), the majority of respondents agree that the speed of applications they use affects their ability to perform their best.

Over half (56%) of U.S. respondents say they lose more than 10% of their workday waiting on technology to deliver the information they need, compared with 42% in the U.K., 39% in Australia, and 30% in Germany.

“It’s no mystery why business users expect access to data to be immediate and continuous. The conundrum facing IT decision makers is how to predict and prevent performance bottlenecks before users perceive a slowdown in responsiveness,” said Suresh Vasudevan, CEO, Nimble Storage. “The performance bottleneck between the data and the application, which we call the ‘app-data gap’, negatively impacts employee work time and ultimately impairs business performance. We believe that by bypassing reactive approaches for root cause analysis that typically take days or weeks, IT departments can harness data sciences and machine learning to predict and prevent barriers to data velocity while fully empowering employees to achieve their best.“
 
Can Machine Learning Prevent Application Downtime? Today’s IT infrastructure is full of complexity. A major app-data gap can disrupt data delivery, degrade worker productivity, create customer dissatisfaction and damage a company’s overall speed of business and reputation. While it’s easy and commonplace to point to storage as the primary culprit for the app-data gap, the factors leading to application slowdowns come from a range of issues across the infrastructure stack.

According to a Nimble Labs Research Report – which analyzed more than 12,000 cases documenting examples of app-data gap related issues across the Nimble install base of more than 7,500 customers – 54% of all issues have nothing to do with storage. The majority of issues arise from challenges with configuration (28%), interoperability (11%), non-storage best practices impacting performance (8%) and host, compute or VM-related issues (7%). Of the 46% of storage issues detected, hardware and software problems, software update assistance and performance setbacks are most common.

These findings debunk the IT professionals’ first instinct that storage infrastructure is the primary cause of application performance issues. This presumption leads IT professionals to implement fast flash-based storage technologies to accelerate performance, but flash alone does not address the 54% of unrelated storage issues. To close the app-data gap, Nimble believes IT organizations need to leverage predictive analytics that incorporate both data science and machine learning to optimize the performance and availability of applications. These technologies are designed to help identify poor performance early, minimize or eliminate the effects of an issue, prevent businesses from encountering the same problem as their competitors and continually improve performance and availability for users.

The Nimble Storage Predictive Flash platform combines flash performance with InfoSight predictive analytics to deliver data velocity. InfoSight predicts and prevents issues across the IT application-to-storage stack that can slow data delivery. The Predictive Flash platform enables IT organizations to accelerate all applications running across the IT environment and deliver immediate access to information that is essential for enterprises to maintain a competitive edge.

Download the Mind the Gap: How Application Delays Affect Company  Performance (registration required)
Download the full Nimble Labs Research Report: Can Machine Learning Prevent Application Downtime? (registration required)