San Francisco – June 1, 2009 – Riverbed Technology (Nasdaq: RVBD), the IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications and storage, today announced that Kendle International Inc. has selected and deployed Riverbed® WAN optimization solutions. Kendle deployed the Riverbed Steelhead® appliances to speed performance of its centralized applications. As a result, Kendle has dramatically reduced its bandwidth utilization and increased employee productivity while reducing its overall IT infrastructure costs.
Kendle is a leading global clinical research organization providing the full range of early- to late-stage clinical development services for the world's biopharmaceutical industry. The organization was founded in 1981. To support its growing employee base in dispersed locations worldwide, Kendle has a multi-tiered IT infrastructure that consists of six regional data centers that maintain a large amount of equipment and various infrastructure components, from application servers to mail systems and databases. Several of these locations have a massive amount of clinical data that is regularly accessed by employees in Kendle’s global locations.
Access to centralized applications, including SharePoint, PeopleSoft, Oracle, SQL, Lotus Notes, and a variety of internal applications, is critical to the success of Kendle’s business. Therefore, Kendle’s IT team is constantly searching for solutions to improve remote access and improve overall system efficiency.
As part of its continuous improvement program, Kendle installed network compression appliances at its six primary data centers, deployed Citrix to WAN-enable the heavier core applications, and upgraded its network bandwidth. Although this provided marked performance improvement, the company decided to reevaluate its entire WAN optimization environment by engaging Gartner for market analysis and then moved forward with a vendor evaluation process.
“Our number one goal was to find a new WAN optimization solution that would positively impact our end-users’ experience when accessing our centralized applications. Riverbed came out on top in all of the tests we conducted in our real-world environment,” said James Miller, Director of Global Networking and Telecommunications at Kendle. “During the free trial of the Riverbed Steelhead appliances we received unsolicited positive responses from remote office end-users and IT staff. Once the evaluation was complete and the devices removed, we had end-users and IT knocking on our doors asking what had happened. This was the big seller for us. A positive end-user experience is critical.”
Kendle deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances at its six primary data center locations. Within a 30-day timeframe, Kendle removed 1.2 terabytes of data from the WAN and experienced a more than three-fold capacity improvement in terms of the bandwidth utilization. With Riverbed installed, Kendle is experiencing reduced utilization of WAN bandwidth, including a 70% reduction in Lotus Notes traffic, approximately 78% reduction in TCP CIFS traffic, and an 83% reduction in HTTP traffic. The reduction of data traversing the WAN has eliminated the need for Kendle to invest in additional bandwidth upgrades at the majority of its sites.
At several remote locations, Kendle has deployed VMware ESX servers that host user and company data, as well as provide infrastructure services. “This solution works well, but there is still an investment in the server infrastructure and backup infrastructure at these remote locations. Additionally, traditional backups require that an administrator change tapes and check the backups each day, which can be rather time consuming,” said Nathan Thompson, Corporate Nework Manager at Kendle. In these locations Kendle is leveraging its Steelhead appliance deployment by running the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) as a replacement to its traditional ESX deployments. “Making use of the RSP platform and Steelhead appliance performance gains allows us to consolidate data back into the datacenters. We are able to provide basic infrastructure services such as DNS, DHCP, WINS and WDS from within the RSP platform. By moving all data back to the data center, the need for backup infrastructure in our remote sites has been eliminated,” said Thompson.
“Selecting Riverbed as our WAN optimization vendor has provided us with scenarios for our IT infrastructure that we haven’t previously been able to take advantage of,” Thompson continued. “The application acceleration and data deduplication was critical, but the added benefit of further consolidating infrastructure at our remote locations provides us with great cost savings and productivity gains.”
When Kendle selected Riverbed as its WAN optimization provider, the IT team liked the synergies that Riverbed solutions had with VMware technology. Though Kendle has already virtualized more than 60% of its global infrastructure using VMware, the organization is looking to further reduce its IT footprint at remote offices through the use of VMware on Riverbed’s RSP platform.
Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed's products and services, and statements relating to Riverbed’s ability to meet the needs of distributed organizations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed’s business are set forth in our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on April 30, 2009. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Any future product, feature or related specification that may be referenced in this release are for information purposes only and are not commitments to deliver any technology or enhancement. Riverbed reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time.
About Kendle
Kendle International Inc. (Nasdaq: KNDL) is a leading global clinical research organization providing the full range of early- to late-stage clinical development services for the world's biopharmaceutical industry. The Company’s focus is on innovative solutions that reduce cycle times for our customers and accelerate the delivery of life-enhancing drugs to market for the benefit of patients worldwide. As one of the fastest-growing global providers of Phase I-IV services, Kendle offers experience spanning more than 100 countries, along with industry-leading patient access and retention capabilities and broad therapeutic expertise, to meet customers' clinical development challenges.
Additional information and investor kits are available upon request from Kendle, 441 Vine Street, Suite 500, Cincinnati, OH 45202 or from the Kendle Web site at www.kendle.com.
About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the IT infrastructure performance company. The Riverbed family of wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions liberates businesses from common IT constraints by increasing application performance, enabling consolidation, and providing enterprise-wide network and application visibility – all while eliminating the need to increase bandwidth, storage or servers. Thousands of companies with distributed operations use Riverbed to make their IT infrastructure faster, less expensive and more responsive. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com.
Riverbed Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead, RiOS, Interceptor, Think Fast, the Riverbed logo, Mazu, Profiler and Cascade are trademarks or registered trademarks of Riverbed Technology All other trademarks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
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Riverbed Technology
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Riverbed Technology
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