Is your Salesforce Slow? — Here’s How You Can Solve IT!

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Salesforce is one of the first applications that’s extended to new offices when U.S. companies expand into global locations, such as China. However, slow application performance often limits adoption and usage, thus negatively impacting business execution for newly opened branches.

“China sales reps weren’t updating Salesforce data until after the deals closed because it was too slow to update,” recalled the Salesforce administrator for a global enterprise, “As a result, we didn’t have any visibility into what was going on.”

For the China branch office, tasks were taking twice as long as their U.S counterparts. Business productivity was degrading and it took more people to complete the work.

“Salesforce impacts the heart of everything we do: Sales, Revenue, Marketing, Payroll, Client Success, you name it,” explained the VP of Sales, “If Salesforce performs poorly, it also impacts everything we do.”

Salesforce vs. Sales Force
Unfortunately, the speed of Salesforce can be an issue for many end-users across the world. When the company’s sales force starts having major performance delays with applications like Salesforce, it quickly becomes an issue for IT, and often the CIO.

In fact, some findings from a recent CIO Insight report highlighted that IT professionals are beginning to feel the heat when it comes to SaaS application performance:

  • 90% said they received complaints about application performance
  • 94% said their network is mission-critical
  • 67% said end-users are demanding enhanced application performance

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The Problem with Global Performance: Centralized Distribution
Although Salesforce is a world-renowned SaaS application, performance suffers due to what is known as centralized distribution.

This is when the SaaS application is hosted in a single data center or point of presence (PoP), where it is accessed by end-users around the world.

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With centralized SaaS applications, data from global end-users must travel long distances

By having a centralized location for their software, Salesforce makes the job of maintaining their services more efficient. It also ensures every customer has the latest possible update.

But as you can see from the diagram above, this is great if you’re close to the PoP. For remote users, this distance can cause a performance issue.

This Distance Factor is an Issue for CIOs
Overcoming the distance issue for Salesforce and other SaaS applications is one thing keeping CIOs up at night.

For example, a North American company needs to deploy Salesforce to centralize their sales and leads data. Most of their users are in the U.S., so when the company signs up, Salesforce will deploy them to a PoP closest to the U.S. headquarters.

The U.S. teams are happy, but what about the teams located in Australia, China, or the Philippines?

Anyone overseas will be impacted by this deployment decision because they are forced to access the company’s Salesforce data center in the United States. What’s more is that the minute a U.S. employee has to conduct business overseas, they too will see an immediate drop in application performance.

The reason why is end-users in remote geographies have to log into the software through the internet and their data has to travel from their location to the U.S. in order to access the application.

Because of the distance data must travel over internet, Salesforce performance for worldwide users will always be an issue.

Therefore, if there are SaaS application performance issues…well, that is a problem for the network to solve.

The Solution: A Modern Network Built for Worldwide Salesforce Users
Since Salesforce is centralized, what’s needed to solve the performance issue is a network with global distribution, like Aryaka SmartConnect. With PoPs located on all six habitable continents, SmartConnect is able to bypass the public internet and provide global end-users with faster performance.

Aryaka SmartConnect also includes built-in application acceleration software. This increases the amount of data that can pass through the connection, and reduces the latency between the end-user and Salesforce. Application performance improves and the user experience is more consistent.

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Aryaka SmartConnect, a globally distributed network, provides faster connectivity for branch offices and end-users to Salesforce worldwide.

In other words, Aryaka SmartConnect shortens the distance between remote end-users and Salesforce, while also providing a much faster pathway to the service.

A network with this infrastructure is also easy to scale and deploy for any global enterprise because no additional hardware is necessary.. With Aryaka SmartConnect, the public internet is the only required access point. As long as an end-user has an internet connection, they can access Salesforce (or any other SaaS application) through Aryaka’s globally distributed network, and have the same performance consistency from anywhere in the world.

The Salesforce Superhighway: Same Delivery, Faster Transportation
Nearly half a thousand enterprises are using Aryaka SmartConnect to access their mission-critical SaaS applications, including Salesforce.

End-users are logging in through the internet, but behind the scenes, they’re on an accelerated superhighway bypassing the distance that once made application performance a factor. Companies receive all the benefits of Salesforce collaboration, with the application performance as if the software were on-premises.

Aryaka SmartConnect is what enables global enterprises to improve the speed of their Salesforce application performance. A globally distributed network with built-in application acceleration software provides an enterprise with the quality connection they would not find through the public internet. Furthermore, they are able to connect their global end-users with fast and reliable access to Salesforce that improves business execution.

Accelerate your application performance on the Salesforce superhighway, sign up for a free trial today.

About the author

Gary Sevounts
Gary Sevounts is the Chief Marketing Officer at Aryaka Networks, and is responsible for Aryaka’s global marketing efforts. He has extensive experience with software and SaaS products in the IT infrastructure and security space, as well as marketing and sales technology, having held marketing and product management leadership roles with a number of industry leaders.