Application Acceleration Enables Worldwide Business Operations and Collaboration
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:RVBD) announced today that Liz Claiborne Inc. has selected and deployed Riverbed’s Steelhead® wide-area data services (WDS) appliances at 37 sites across North America, in Asia, and in Europe and plans to deploy more than 60 additional Steelhead appliances at sites across Europe, and at sites in the Middle East and in Asia.
Liz Claiborne Inc. designs and markets an extensive range of branded women's and men's apparel, accessories and fragrance products. The company has a diverse portfolio of quality brands that are available domestically and internationally via wholesale and retail channels. The more than 40 brands in the Liz Claiborne Inc. portfolio are available at more than 30,000 points of sale worldwide.
Liz Claiborne Inc. has locations across the globe, including distribution centers, and management, sales, finance, and operations offices. Sites are located in North America, Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, India, China and Southeast Asia. To accommodate the growth of its business in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and integrate worldwide operations, the company sought to both deploy custom applications designed for the global retail business and improve response times of existing applications over the wide area network (WAN). These include their ERP application, and Microsoft Office, Exchange 2003, CommVault backup and SharePoint.
Liz Claiborne Inc. maintains a central datacenter in North Bergen, New Jersey and regional hubs in New York City, Santa Fe Springs, California, Hong Kong and Amsterdam. Some applications, such as the company’s ERP and finance applications, are centralized while others, including email and backup, are located in regional hubs.
Global users were experiencing very slow application response times accessing files not located in their offices. Users often had to wait several minutes to download financial spreadsheets and other files, significantly reducing productivity. In addition, Liz Claiborne Inc. sought to deploy new applications, in a centralized architecture critical to the company’s competitiveness worldwide. However, network congestion and the scarcity and expense of bandwidth in many remote locations made this task difficult. The company sought to address these issues by deploying a WDS solution.
“After extensive evaluation of other solutions we selected Riverbed® over the competition,” said Bob Czukkermann, supervisor of server infrastructure at Liz Claiborne Inc. “The Steelhead appliance was able to optimize all of our important applications and delivered the best performance over our global Cisco network. It was also the easiest to deploy and manage.”
Liz Claiborne Inc. has deployed the Steelhead appliances at 37 sites in North America, Asia and Europe. The company plans additional installations in the next eighteen months at 60 sites across Europe, and at sites in Turkey, Sir Lanka, Hong Kong, South China, Taiwan, Indonesia and India.
“It now takes us less than 10 minutes to get a site up and running with a Steelhead appliance, including time for testing,” continued Czukkermann. “The boxes are shipped pre-configured by Riverbed. Our technical staff and a user in the remote site manage the process in a single phone call. Riverbed has made deployment to sites across the globe simple and painless.”
Since installation of the Steelhead appliances, user performance has improved dramatically. Downloads that once took several minutes can be accomplished in thirty seconds. And, the Steelhead appliances have reduced network traffic by over 80%, allowing Liz Claiborne Inc. to deploy its custom applications for use worldwide. In addition, while backup over the WAN was not an original concern at the company, Liz Claiborne Inc. has been able to reduce backup windows of CommVault from 16 to six hours.
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