Nimble Storage Research Study Reveals U.S. Companies May Be Losing as Much as $7.5B of Worker Time Annually

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 27, 2016) - Nimble Storage (NYSE: NMBL), the leader in predictive flash storage, today 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.

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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 percent of U.S. respondents reported that the speed of applications they use significantly 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 percent of business users say they avoid using some software applications at work because they run too slowly, only 18 percent 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.

Mind the Gap: How Application Delays Affect Company Performance 
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 percent of business users avoid using certain applications at work because they run too slowly.
• Nearly three-fourths (71 percent) of all business users experience some level of delays while accessing software at work, with 28 percent saying they experience delays "all the time."
• Over 50 percent 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 percent) 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 percent of Gen Xers.
• Half of millennials surveyed say they've stopped using an application because it runs too slowly -- significantly more than users in other age groups.
• Over three-fourths (78 percent) of millennials say they occasionally or constantly experience delays when accessing or inputting information with business software, compared with 60 percent of baby boomers.
  
  

Key Regional Findings

• Respondents from the U.S. and Southeast Asia are the most demanding of their technology infrastructures. In the U.S. (76 percent) and Southeast Asia (73 percent), the majority of respondents agree that the speed of applications they use significantly affects their ability to perform their best.
• Over half (56 percent) of U.S. respondents say they lose more than 10 percent of their workday waiting on technology to deliver the information they need, compared with 42 percent in the U.K., 39 percent in Australia, and 30 percent 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 data 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 percent of all issues have nothing to do with storage. The majority of issues arise from challenges with configuration (28 percent), interoperability (11 percent), non-storage best practices impacting performance (8 percent) and host, compute or VM-related issues (7 percent). Of the 46 percent 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 percent 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 significantly 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.

For more information on Nimble's Predictive Flash platform, please visit www.nimblestorage.com.

Nimble Storage Resources

• Download the Mind the Gap: How Application Delays Affect Company Performance
• Download the full Nimble Labs Research Report: Can Machine Learning Prevent Application Downtime?
• Nimble Storage Website
• Case Studies and Videos
• Follow Nimble Storage on Twitter: @NimbleStorage
• Follow Nimble Storage on LinkedIn
• Visit Nimble Storage on Facebook
• Visit the NimbleConnect Community
  
  

About Nimble Storage
Nimble Storage (NYSE: NMBL) is the leader in predictive flash storage solutions. Nimble offers a Predictive Flash platform that combines flash performance with predictive analytics to predict and prevent barriers to data velocity caused by complex IT infrastructure. Nimble customers experience absolute performance, non-stop availability and cloud-like agility that accelerate critical business processes. More than 7,500 enterprises, governments, and service providers have deployed the Nimble Predictive Flash Platform across more than 50 countries. For more information visit www.nimblestorage.com and follow us on Twitter: @nimblestorage.

Nimble Storage, the Nimble Storage logo, CASL, InfoSight, SmartStack, Timeless Storage, Data Velocity Delivered, Unified Flash Fabric and NimbleConnect are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nimble Storage, Inc. Other trade names or words used in this document are the properties of their respective owners.