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.

You 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 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

maybe every third day. They don’t need to be in the office all the time. A lot of people really like the flexibility of that kind of work environment. That’s a huge cultural shift, but the COVID-19 era has proved to us that it can be done. So I think that the workspace of the future is going to be radically different. We had been working even pre COVID-19 on a program that was for workers to work from anywhere. And anywhere actually turned out to be the home when the pandemic hit. It was kind of fortuitous that literally three weeks before all of this kind of came about, we had been working on the product on one of our client accelerators. We took our entire engineering home for a day and everybody had to work from home using their computers and using our software to help accelerate. And it worked out perfectly.

I think in the near future, work is going to be a little bit more flexible and workspace more collaborative. One study that we have done said that today about 55% of all meetings were done in person pre-COVID. In the future, the estimate is about 25% of meetings are going to be done in person. And the remainder can be done via Zoom, via Teams, via WebEx, or any other kind of video capability.

Now we are talking about a hybrid workforce model. What will be the impact of this on IT?

A lot of the younger workforce has family and they have got children playing, streaming gaming on the same bandwidth that mom and dad are trying to do video conference or work. So there is a huge impact on IT. If you think about the IT organisation or the IT professional, it first comes down to, “Where are my people? Do I have them connected? What is their productivity?” And they’re going to run into a productivity issue if they can’t have the in-office work experience from their remote location. And I say remote location because that could be a coffee shop as much as it could be their home. This means you’ve got to get the performance up. You’ve got to make sure that it’s secure. And then you got to make sure that they’re actually productive.

The IT professionals are really going to have to work on that and understand what are the productivity tools they could use to give an in-office experience at home. And I’ve always said that the bigger the company, the more complex their network. And the more complex the network, that’s good for Riverbed because that’s what we do.

One of the things we have seen in the last eight months is an accelerated adoption of cloud-based applications. Do you have a solution for accelerating cloud-based applications?

Yes. Every product that we have, even our traditional SteelHeads, have now been virtualised to run in a cloud environment. Everything is moving to the cloud because it’s a fast way to get things up and running. Usually it’s pretty standardised, so it’s simpler than maybe deploying a lot of hardware and all that kind of stuff. When you think about our four pillars, every one of the pillars has a cloud-based solution because that’s what customers are doing. We have both a SaaS accelerator and a client accelerator that sits on the desktop to speed up applications, whether on the cloud, hybrid, or a premise-based environment.