Article written by Jackson Connell, Senior Manager, Product & Solutions Marketing, Riverbed

IT teams are clearly feeling the pressure with CIOs and IT buyers predicting their tech spend will only increase by 5.5% this year—a meaningful deceleration from previous expectations and below last year's annual inflation rate of 8.3%. In other words, despite rising costs, IT teams will spend less this year when adjusted for inflation, reflecting stagnant IT budgets that aren't keeping pace with economic realities. Having to make do with less purchasing power is challenging, but there are opportunities to generate efficiencies within IT and get more out of every penny. In this blog, we explore how Aternity Digital Experience Management (DEM) can help IT teams reduce costs while maintaining a flawless digital experiences.

What is Aternity DEM?

Aternity DEM (Digital Experience Management) is a full spectrum, digital experience management platform that provides insight into the business impact of customer and employee digital experiences. It achieves this by capturing and storing technical telemetry at scale from employee devices, business applications, and cloud-native application services.

Equipped with this comprehensive visibility into the actual user experience and device performance, IT teams can create better experiences for users and leaders can make informed business decisions on IT spend. Here's how:

Smart device refresh

Typically, IT teams will refresh devices based on their age, say, every three or four years. But age alone doesn't speak to the actual health or performance of a device. Some perfectly good devices may be thrown out too soon, and other faulty devices need to be replaced a bit sooner so an employee can optimize their productivity. Aternity DEM offers insight into actual user experience and device performance, informing teams on when to replace devices based on performance.

What it means for you: intelligent device replacement helps save you money by refreshing devices exactly when they need to be replaced, and not a moment sooner.

Eliminated software bloat

We all keep subscriptions longer than necessary, and the same is true for enterprises. A SaaS trends report found the average company wastes more than $135,000 annually on unused, underused, or duplicate SaaS tools and this cost increases dramatically for large enterprises. Aternity DEM gives IT the power to automatically identify software licenses that are going unused or aren't used often.

What it means for you: Instantly reduce software bloat by cutting licenses that are going mostly unused and redeploy those savings in ways that can better help the business.

Curtailed shadow IT

All too frequently, teams across an enterprise will purchase SaaS tools without going through the proper IT channels. This inevitably leads to redundancies, increased risk, and headaches for IT. But Aternity DEM can identify shadow IT software, and either direct usage to an approved application to eliminate the additional expense, or leverage approved purchasing channels to better handle the spend.

What it means for you: By curtailing shadow IT, IT teams can better understand and manage the software being used by employees. At the same time, it helps IT identify and eliminate duplicate and wasteful solutions so budgets are more effectively and efficiently utilized.

Cut costs and improve performance

Many IT departments have room to gain operational efficiencies by eliminating waste, thus maximizing every dollar. These efficiencies don't have to come at the expense of the user experience. On the contrary, reducing wasteful spending can add money back into budgets that can then be used to hire talent and fill labor gaps, reducing the burden on IT departments so they're more productive. Aternity DEM helps organizations save on their IT costs while at the same time enabling even better digital experiences. It's a win-win.

Technologies