Software vendor management is difficult. You've probably experienced it. The service desk is flooded with tickets about a specific application. Employees are frustrated. Your EUC team investigates but can’t find the root cause. So, you reach out to the vendor. Then the inevitable happens: the vendor responds with “Everything is green from our perspective”.
Yet, the issues persist. Tickets continue to come in. Frustrations continue to mount. Without the ability to PROVE that issues employees are experiencing are caused by the vendor's backend, fixing these issues quickly turns into a “blame game”.
What if you could prove that the root cause of issues existed on the vendor side? How would that reshape your ability to fix issues for good?
The right DEX tool allows your EUC team to monitor the experience that employees have with all their applications – including web-based apps – and precisely pinpoint the cause of issues, so you know when the issue is something you can fix, and when it’s something you need to bring to the vendor.
Why EUC Teams Need Better Application Vendor Management
EUC teams need easy and rapid diagnoses of employee SaaS application problems. You need a view that delivers precise visibility into the origin of the problems that employees face.
What if you could provide the vendor with hard data that proves the issue originates on their end?
When you have end-to-end visibility into application performance, you can see if an issue is related to the client device, configuration, or connectivity - and you know the issue originates on your end, and it's up to your teams to fix it.
You Need Data to Prove the Issue is on the Vendor Side
But if the problem derives from the software vendor's backend, you need the ability to isolate specific vendor application infrastructure to see which elements are causing employees’ poor experience. You need to understand how differences in employee usage or configuration of applications relate to the performance of the SaaS backend.
And once you have isolated the incident and diagnosed the cause on the vendor side, you need a shared, end-to-end perspective of the employee application experience, including not just top-level application page loads, but functional workload components as well, such as key pages and specific application transactions.
Only with this experience-level data can you communicate effectively with vendors, bringing evidence that cuts through the blame game and translates into effective remediations.
How Nexthink Application Experience Unlocks Better Software Vendor Management
Nexthink Application Experience provides a single view of the experience that employees have with all your applications, including web-based applications, so that your EUC team can easily see the performance, reliability, and employee adoption from a single pane of glass – and can isolate issues to identify when the problem is on your end, and when you need to reach out to vendors.
Let's look at a recent customer example. FHI 360 is a nonprofit human development organization dedicated to improving lives in lasting ways by advancing integrated, locally driven solutions. A critical part of FHI360’s global business involves global employees using a purchasing and requisition application: KissFlow.
This application, KissFlow (DPA) is a commercial, SaaS web-based application that has been customized by FHI360. After a recent update to the application, employees began complaining of significant slowdowns and lockouts when using key parts of the application. The EUC team used the Application Experience capability to track the performance of applications on the client, network, and backend to eliminate potential causes and eventually determine whether the problem was on the vendor's backend. They used this information, specifically across the affected employees and regions, to work closely with the vendor to ensure ownership and faster resolution.
The result? They went from backend times of 10 seconds or more, to less than two seconds:
Application Experience – Architected to Inform
Application Experience’s built-in ability to break down web page/transaction performance into Client, Network, and Backend uniquely and quickly gives EUC and IT teams the “data they need” to rapidly and productively engage with their application vendors to ensure the fastest possible ownership and resolution of issues.
For more information, please visit: Nexthink Application Experience
