Survey Says…. Consumer Apps Trump Enterprise Apps on Reliability and Performance
Back when I was an analyst at META Group, we had a saying: See something once, it’s a data point. Twice, it’s something to watch. Three times, and it’s a trend. Well here at ScaleArc, we were definitely seeing a trend – conversations with customer after customer highlighted the challenges of meeting the expectations of today’s more demanding customers.
Any scientist will tell you – the plural of anecdote is not “data.” We had developed a hypothesis – we didn’t have the data to know if it was true.
The hypothesis? Consumer grade is the new enterprise grade. Plenty of anecdotes showed that people’s experiences with personal apps were affecting expectations for enterprise apps. To test our thesis, we surveyed more than 600 folks, nearly all of them IT decision makers. The findings were very revealing:
- 78% of respondents said consumer apps set the new gold standard for application reliability and performance
- 81% said consumer software is more reliable than enterprise software
- Most said they switch to consumer software products when enterprise software doesn’t work, including:
Skype – 37%
Dropbox – 34%
Google Docs – 34%
Google Drive – 34% - 95% said they would be negatively impacted if a website were slow or had downtime, with popular consumer sites easily beating out enterprise sites in terms of the impact of poor performance
You can check out the infographic and full report to see more of the survey responses.
One ScaleArc customer, DealerSocket, delivers a CRM system for car dealerships and commented on the shifting expectations the organization has seen in its customer base.
“People are mobile all the time and always connected,” said Michael Atkins, IT operations for DealerSocket. “So whether it’s a work app or a personal app, no one has the patience for it to be slow or – worse yet – offline. That experience has raised the bar for the service level we have to deliver with our enterprise SaaS offering.”
What’s your experience? Have you found yourself less patient with work apps because of how you use Facebook or other personal apps? We’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments section.
comments powered by Disqus