Survey Says: Customers Select Aryaka for the Performance, Stay for the Flexibility

In a recent customer survey conducted in partnership with third-party research firm TechValidate, we sought to get a deeper understanding of our customers – why they first selected Aryaka and how, as these organizations continue to grow, change and meet new challenges, they continue to find value in Aryaka.

First, it’s no surprise that the top reasons global organizations select Aryaka as their managed SD-WAN as-a-Service partner is to solve their application performance challenges (49%), provide reliable, stable connectivity to China (47%) and as a way to reduce costs through either the replacement or augmentation of existing MPLS networks (45%).

But the reasons Aryaka customers stay is a slightly different story: it’s ultimately about time savings, flexibility and reliability. After deploying Aryaka solutions, 63% of all surveyed customers report time savings as a major benefit and that number increases to over 70% for large enterprises. Over half respondents estimate they save between 10-25% in (wo)man hours after deploying Aryaka, while nearly 20% estimate saving up to 50% of their time. As one respondent, a Director of Infrastructure at an S&P 500 Electronics company, explains, “Aside from the technical benefits, Aryaka’s ability to monitor our network health and work directly with our ISP providers has significantly reduced the amount of time we spend on troubleshooting ISP-related issues.”

But what does this time savings actually mean for IT organizations?

For some, it means removing an operational burden that otherwise may not be managed well and could negatively impact the end-user experience. One respondent, a Director of IT at a small business computer software company, notes in the survey, “Without Aryaka’s Last Mile Management service, we would be struggling to manage and care for the various circuits we have in our global locations with our limited resources.”

For other enterprises, it provides an opportunity to refocus energies on other high priority projects and evolve the IT organization into a partner to the business. As Mark Baker, CTO of Pilot Freight Services, puts it, “When we talk about evolving IT departments where they become business partners and having the technology to enable that – that’s really the position that Aryaka gives an IT organization.”

Then there’s the flexibility provided by a global managed SD-WAN solution. Dynamic businesses need dynamic networks to support them – for both the planned and the unplanned.

Thirty-four percent of respondents noted that quicker deployments and the ability to set up new sites efficiently is a key benefit of Aryaka and that number increases to 52% for respondents who displaced their legacy MPLS networks with Aryaka. As Eric Jones, IT Infrastructure Manager at CallisonRTKL, describes, “Deploying Aryaka services in a new location is quick and easy. You can be up and running in hours without the need for onsite technical staff.”

The ability to easily and efficiently add new sites isn’t just invaluable to growing companies, but also to organizations experiencing growth through mergers and acquisitions, a common use case among Aryaka customers (see here, here and here). It’s no secret that acquisitions pose a unique set of challenges in unifying products, company cultures and existing IT and infrastructure. Enabling organizations to quickly and easily unify their IT networks not only saves time and money for the IT department, but also saves times and boosts productivity for end-users.

This flexibility has also been critical throughout the last year in supporting Aryaka customers through the unprecedented challenges created by the global pandemic. Nearly half of surveyed customers responded that the ability to adjust bandwidth across sites with ease has been the biggest benefit during COVID-19, while 43% cited the ability to better support a surge of remote users. Similarly, 25% noted the ability to enable a hybrid workplace, our “new normal,” which experts agree will likely continue long after the pandemic is over.

Additionally, reliability – both from a network performance and customer support perspective – is critical. For an IT organization, the end-user is their customer. So when end-users are happy and productive, the IT organization can rest easy. Over half of our surveyed customers cite stable, reliable connectivity for global end-users and faster application performance as the two biggest benefits of Aryaka.

Patrick Thompson, CIO of Albemarle, shares that the improved the global performance of Microsoft suite not only reduced costs by cutting down travel and eliminating expensive videoconferencing equipment, but also increased company productivity: “We rolled out 365, Skype and Teams across the world and it really helped us change the way we work across the world. Less travel [and]… Aryaka provided the level of performance we were looking for with 1% less jitter and less than 1% drop rates.”

As another respondent to our survey, Ben Warner, IT Manager at Henny Penny, succinctly puts it, “Aryaka increased the reliability, stability and performance of our connectivity to China, allowing for a better experience for our end-users and IT administrators.”

Lastly, a whopping 76% of surveyed customers responded that their network TCO decreased after deploying Aryaka. While over 30% of customers cited decreased hardware costs, decreased software costs and/or decreased transport costs, nearly half of all customers cited decreased time spent on incident resolution, again emphasizing how a managed SD-WAN solution like Aryaka can free up IT organizations from the tedious tasks and operational burdens of managing a network to focus on other priorities.

Whether it is global application performance challenges, connectivity to China issues or lack of a unified global network, many Aryaka customers select us because we help them solve those critical challenges. What our survey ultimately helped us understand, however, was that Aryaka customers remain our customers because we partner with them beyond these initial use cases. As their organizations grow and change, we continue to provide an invaluable partnership that helps our customers meet the new business demands of today and plan for the future.

Stay tuned for additional information on this survey and more informative surveys to come.

Editor’s Note: Though all surveyed respondents are verified customers, only some quotes are named as respondents had the option to provide anonymous feedback.