Member Spotlight: Riverbed and the successful hybrid work model

We are proud to offer flexible office solutions for innovative companies operating on hybrid work models, such as Riverbed. Since 2021, OneCoWork Plaça Catalunya is the home for Riverbed's team in Barcelona and we had the chance to speak with Verena Flecker, Senior Manager for Digital Sales, to understand the key factors for the success of their hybrid work model and the main challenges and learnings shared by the company. Check it out:

Can you give us a quick introduction about you and your professional background?

My name is Verena Flecker, and I am originally from Austria. I moved to Barcelona over 5 years ago because I like the weather and lifestyle, but also due to the presence of many Tech companies looking for Sales professionals. I have been working in IT Sales since the start of my career and I'm currently leading a team of 12 International Sales Professionals for Riverbed.
 

In a few words, what solutions does Riverbed offer and what is the main purpose of the company?

Riverbed’s purpose is to maximize visibility and performance for any application, to any user, over any network. Through two industry-leading solution portfolios, Riverbed is the only company with the collective richness of telemetry from network to app to end user, that illuminates and then accelerates every interaction, so organizations can deliver a seamless digital experience and drive enterprise performance.
 

Is Riverbed a fully remote or a hybrid model company? 

Similar to many other technology companies, Riverbed has a hybrid work model in place. As a result of the pandemic, organizations are more prepared than ever before to support a remote workforce. Firstly, it’s around having the right technology in place for employees working from home or anywhere is crucial, including connectivity, collaboration, visibility, and performance solutions ensure employees remain productive. At Riverbed, we have the technology that has helped us, and our customers maximize the performance and reliability of apps and remote workers with solutions such as Client Accelerator, SaaS Accelerator, and unified Network Performance Management. 

Secondly, the new hybrid work environment gives employees the opportunity to have a better work/life balance, less commute time, and in terms of employment, it helps to ensure a diverse workforce as employers are able to open doors to employees, they may have not been able to consider in the past due to geography. Whilst we do a lot of meetings and collaboration over video conferences, there is a lot of value meeting colleagues in personat the coworking space, as the human touch will always be important.

What are the main challenges and learnings about the hybrid work model?

Whilst digital transformation was already happening at the start of pandemic, digitization went into overdrive, overnight. As a result of the shift to remote work and ‘work from anywhere’ models, many organizations were faced with unpredictable performance, limited control of their remote network, limited capacity to support remote user connectivity at scale; and challenges in visibility with hybrid-network and remote work environments. 

Whilst the hybrid-networks, cloud, work from anywhere models have many advantages for organizations and users, such as customer engagement, operational savings, and greater flexibility, it does create complexity with challenges of having full visibility of networks/users, network congestions, latency, and unpredictable last mile networks.

The recent pandemic has certainly caused some challenges to many companies regarding this work model as this was not considered “the norm”. While some challenges such as employee onboarding and office culture are often facilitated by being physically present, having a very supportive global team that has made tremendous efforts in creating different online training platforms, occasional trips whether it is our Barcelona team visiting their respective markets, different departments or company leaders visiting us here, as well as sharing a coworking space and organizing team events have helped us overcome these challenges and adapt to this new work model.
 

How has being part of a coworking space enabled the company to grow and to succeed with your work model?

Being part of a coworking space has provided a great and positive impact to the success of our work model in many ways. While some employees enjoy working from home, other employees still enjoy going to the coworking space occasionally to spend time with their team and connect with new people and make new friends. Also, having a physical presence next to each other in the office encourages collaboration and open dialogue which can contribute significantly to an employee’s knowledge and in turn, the overall growth of the company.
 

Riverbed is celebrating its 20-year anniversary this year. How is the company shaping the future for the next 20 years and the main goals ahead of you?

20 years ago, Riverbed set out to deliver an exceptional digital experience for users anywhere. With technological innovation growing by the day, this mission has never been more important than today as we strive to keep up with solving the challenges arising from the ever-growing complexity of networks as companies face pressure to ensure every click is effortless and delivers on the user’s high expectations. Our history of innovation has brought us to a new chapter with the recent launch of our new unified observability portfolio ‘Alluvio by Riverbed’.

Riverbed offers a unique approach to unified observability that is comprehensive, unified and easy-to-operate. Alluvio unified observability solutions help customers find that gold as fast as possible, turning actionable insights into business value, so companies can stay competitive, productive and satisfy users’ fierce appetite for seamless digital experiences. Together, with the Acceleration portfolio, Riverbed helps customers first illuminate and then accelerate every interaction – empowering the experience for users everywhere.

Our priority for this year and beyond is to position Riverbed for a new phase of sustained growth and success by disrupting the visibility marketplace. The future of the workplace is hybrid in nature, and we are accelerating the company strategy to ensure that it is best positioned to capitalize on new market opportunities and deliver innovation for our partners and customers.

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