INTERVIEW
NEW RULES OF THE GAME RICH MCBEE, THE NEWLY-APPOINTED PRESIDENT AND CEO OF RIVERBED, TALKS ABOUT THE FUTURE OF WORK AND HOW BUSINESSES CAN PIVOT TO EMBRACE THE NEW NORMAL.
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ou have been with Riverbed for more than a year now as the CEO. What attracted you to this opportunity? When I came to Riverbed, it was a company that was kind of an iconic brand, which lost a little bit of focus. When I came in, one of the things that we did was an assessment of the company to understand what we are good at? Network performance was clearly the foundation of the company, and visibility was the next piece. When I came to the company, I said, “This is a company that I can help and add some focus.” And we’ve done that. Our strategy now has four pillars, and it’s about being the leader in performance and visibility. The four pillars are WAN optimisation, which is really the cornerstone of the company, and our acceleration package, which is about not only optimising networks, but also applications. Then the network performance management is our third pillar, and SD-WAN the fourth pillar. Things that happened when I was at Mitel were very similar. It was a premise-based company that had been around forever, and it needed a little bit of refresh or a refocusing. And we did that with the company and refocused it. It had a large installed base that was moving to the cloud, very much like Riverbed. And we made that journey, and we’ve bridged those things. One of the hardest things to do is to transition 20
CXO INSIGHT ME
DECEMBER 2020
from an older technology to the new technology and get your engineering to work 80% on the new stuff and 20% on the old. And we’re on that journey right now as a company. Are you seeing any big shift in the technology priorities of your clients now as a result of the pandemic? It’s been really interesting. When you take a general workforce, about 350 million people were working from home or anywhere. And that shift was over 1.1 billion overnight within three weeks. It made many companies stop and think about, “Okay, where are my people? What are they doing? How productive are they? How’s our business performing?” In a very short period, nobody would have thought that they could have done this. I have my entire workforce working from home today. Nine months ago, if you had said that, I’d have said that’s a business case problem that you’re never going to see. I would have liked to have a lot of workers from home, but that’s something that you have never seen. And then instantaneously, it happened, and businesses made it work. Maybe some of these barriers that we always thought of in the past aren’t as big as we thought they were. Today, a lot of CEOs and CIOs to have daily conversations about, “How can we enhance our business?” “What’s the next level of productivity I can drive to my employees because I’m going to have a bunch of them working from home?” I’ve talked with a lot of
different people and they’re actually working more today from home than they work in the office. There’s no more commute. It doesn’t mean that we’re not fatigued, but people are saying, “Look, I used to work 10 hours a day. I’m finding out that I’m working 12 or 13 hours a day. I’m on Zoom all the time. But I don’t have a commute anymore. I haven’t done traveling. I’m not spending six hours on an airplane and going to a hotel.” All that time is filled up with productive work. Do you think remote work is now going to be the new normal? Yes, and what’s going to happen is this. Let’s just use some numbers, 350 million people working from home, and COVID hits, it goes to 1.1 billion. I’m pretty comfortable with the idea that 650 million will probably still be working from home in some kind of remote environment. But I think what’s going to happen is the work environment’s going to change. Let me give you an example of an office with a large footprint, let’s say 40,000 meters of space. We’re going to cut that down to 10. That space is now going to become a collaboration space where the marketing teams are going to come in, and they’re going to work Monday morning, from 8 AM till noon. And then they’re going to go work from anywhere or work from home, and they’ll come back the next Monday. Engineering teams with agile development processes need to meet
