Club Improves Customer Service by Accelerating Application Performance
SAN FRANCISCO, BUSINESS WIRE -- Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:RVBD), the performance leader in wide-area data services (WDS), announced today that Hilton Grand Vacations Club, a subsidiary of Hilton Hotels, has selected and deployed Riverbed's Steelhead(R) WDS appliances to accelerate the performance of applications at its offices worldwide. Riverbed's Steelhead appliances have improved network performance and in turn, improved overall customer service by making the sales cycle more efficient. Hilton Grand Vacations Club has installed Steelhead appliances in offices in six locations to date: Orlando, Florida; New York; Las Vegas; the Big Island of Hawaii; Honolulu, and Tokyo.
Hilton Grand Vacations Club has a centralized network at its Orlando headquarters that connects to sales and resort offices around the world; these offices sell vacation ownership in resorts across the U.S. to new customers and also serve more than 100,000 existing members. While centralization has several important benefits -- the company does not need to have technical engineers at every office, for example -- the company was experiencing several challenges, including connection quality issues and latency over the wide area network (WAN). Connectivity varies from country to country; connections in U.S. offices have far more bandwidth than connections in offices in Japan, for example. In addition, Hilton Grand Vacations Club uses contract imaging to send contracts from branch offices to headquarters; these data files are very large and the time required to transfer files had an impact on productivity.
"We looked at a number of WDS products before we decided on Riverbed's Steelhead appliances," said Richard Jackson, senior director, technical operations, at Hilton Grand Vacations Club. "Gartner praised the product in its review, and a member of my team had previous positive experience with the Steelhead appliances. About seven months ago, we deployed a Steelhead appliance in Tokyo and one in Hawaii. The performance improvement was dramatic. From there the project took on a life of its own, and we now have appliances in locations all over the world."
Dramatic Improvements with Steelhead Appliances
Hilton Grand Vacations Club analyzed before and after metrics on the process of scanning contracts to find out what kind of impact Riverbed's appliance had on connectivity and latency. Contract scanning is complex; and involves imaging and OCR-based scanning, storing and indexing over a WAN connection to centralized storage. This process had been optimized for a WAN but even with the optimization pre-implementation, the process could take up to 10 minutes; with the installation of the Steelhead appliance, in many cases it takes less than one minute. CIFS file transfers that once took up to 10 minutes between Tokyo and Hawaii are now transmitted in less than five seconds.
Riverbed's Central Management Console (CMC) enables Hilton Grand Vacations to efficiently manage and troubleshoot network performance from a centralized location. Enhanced reporting capabilities allow network managers to receive detailed reports on optimized and un-optimized traffic, global trending, and global traffic breakdown. "Riverbed's CMC is a very valuable tool for us," continued Jackson. "It provides complete visibility into the WAN, from a single screen."
"The Steelhead appliances have directly improved our customer service through improving our connectivity and application performance," said Jackson. "The bottom line is that we are responsible for making sure the network is performing at its best so our customers and support staff can conduct business and do their jobs in an efficient and effective manner. We have lots of tools to help us run the network, but we've seen a real and noticeable impact on our efficiency with the Steelhead appliance, and it's now part of our standard toolkit. Staff really appreciates the improved network performance and it has had a positive impact on their day-to-day activities by speeding up essential tasks. There's a cost benefit in keeping personnel in our small sales offices happy. In addition, Riverbed has improved the corporate view of IT and what it can do for the business."
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