Riverbed Platform Powers Bajaj Electricals’ Consumer-Centric Digital Transformation Strategy

Riverbed announced that Bajaj Electricals Ltd., a leading Indian consumer electrical equipment manufacturing company, is using the Riverbed Digital Performance Platform to power its consumer-centric digital transformation. This strategy is aimed at driving deeper engagement and transparency with Bajaj Electricals’ customers and distributors, overcoming branch office and retail outlet connectivity issues as well as end-user application performance complaints. Using the Riverbed platform, the company has been able to accelerate application performance substantially and dramatically improve end-user experience and better assess the impact of future IT change on performance, including a major shift to the cloud.

Bajaj Electricals’ business spans lighting, consumer durables like home appliances and fans, engineering and other projects such as wind and solar energy. The company operates 19 offices across the country and manages a chain of thousands of distributors and authorized dealers, over 400,000 retail outlets and more than 450 customer care centers.

In the wake of industry disruption and increased competition, Bajaj Electricals embarked on an ambitious digital transformation journey in 2015 to drive deeper engagement with its end-consumers, most of whom purchase the company’s products through third-parties, and have limited direct exposure to the company. As Bajaj Electricals focused on digital technology as a critical enabler of their business, the pressure on IT grew - more complexity, higher business demands, and less tolerance for down-time and degradation.

“We started by automating key business processes, rapidly adopting new digital technologies and moving more and more apps to the cloud – and we were doing this often times in remote parts of India, where communications infrastructure is poor,” said Pratap Gharge, Executive President & CIO, Bajaj Electricals Ltd. “Our existing infrastructure couldn’t support all this change, and the performance of several of our business-critical apps began to suffer – user complaints skyrocketed. Additionally, lack of visibility into our IT environment made troubleshooting like finding a needle in a haystack – we couldn’t resolve issues quickly, which prolonged downtime, threatening our bottom line and throwing a massive wrench into our transformation plans.”

Driving Business Outcomes with Superior Digital Performance

In order to address these challenges, Bajaj Electricals has deployed a powerful combination of Riverbed Digital Performance solutions to transform IT into a competitive differentiator including:

• Riverbed SteelCentral AppResponsegives the company visibility into application performance issues, combining advanced application and transaction insight, comprehensive end-user experience monitoring, and deep network intelligence. As a result, the speed of Bajaj Electricals’ IT team to respond to end-user application issues has increased dramatically, eliminating downtime and accelerating the performance of business-critical apps by up to 70% in some examples.
• Riverbed SteelCentral Aternityextends this visibility further into the actual end user experience of any local, cloud, or mobile app running on any device. Bajaj Electricals deployed Aternity to investigate and resolve a major performance issue with a custom-developed mobile app used by their field technicians to track and manage customer repair jobs. The issue had stalled user adoption of the app altogether, negatively affecting goals for improving workforce productivity and customer service. Aternity helped them isolate and resolve the problem, boosting end user satisfaction and putting adoption back on track.
• Riverbed SteelHead is the industry’s #1 WAN optimization solution, for the acceleration of application performance on and off the cloud and for remote and mobile workers. With this, Bajaj Electricals has been able to accelerate the delivery of Microsoft Office 365 by 33x, addressing significant performance issues and paving the way to move more and more apps to the cloud.

“We’ve been totally impressed with the performance we’ve been able to deliver using the Riverbed platform. It’s been a powerful enabler of our digital transformation strategy, empowering me and my team to deliver tangible outcomes for the business,” said Gharge. “In an industry where competition is stiff – and being at the forefront is critical – this is everything.”