Riverbed
Maximizing Performance and Visibility

Hilton Grand Vacations Club owns and operates over 3,700 timeshare vacation ownership resorts for more than 100,000 members globally. With branch offices around the world sending large amounts of data to headquarters in Orlando, the company turned to Riverbed to improve application performance, and efficiently manage and troubleshoot network and application performance from a central location.

The contract process has been reduced from more than 30 minutes to just a minute or two. It has a huge effect on customer and employee satisfaction. Rich Jackson, Sr. Director of Technical Operations, Hilton Grand Vacations

ABB is a global leader in power and automation technologies, with about 30,000 people in North America alone. When key applications don’t work it can cost the company as much as $1 million per day. ABB uses Riverbed to track key web-application performance metrics, analyze web-application behavior, and detect problems early.

I use Riverbed SteelCentral Web Analyzer as the canary in the coal mine to tell me when we might be experiencing issues with certain applications. Now, with Riverbed, I can see application performance from end-to-end, track key performance metrics, get granular analysis of application behavior, and share it with the application and server owners. That enables the support teams to quickly shift the focus of the effort to the real culprit. Michael Kerkau, Network Infrastructure and Operations Manager, ABB

Schneider Electric is a global specialist in energy management, with networks connecting 110,000 people and 1,000 remote sites in 100 countries with four data centers.

The views I created using Riverbed open APIs ease capacity planning of Internet bandwidth / Internet peering, help negotiate costs with upstream transit providers by easily qualifying the most important destinations, and elaborate a peering (public / private) policy to collect the traffic from Internet exchange points. Lionel Marie, Network Architect, Schneider Electric

Tecan, a leader in advanced automation and detection solutions for life science laboratories, has 1,200 employees at its Swiss HQ, R&D and production sites in North America and Europe, and a 52-country sales-and-service network. A sprawl of remote servers, storage, and apps has expanded across these sites with little standardization and data security. “We wanted a single point solution rather than the cumbersome and complex multi-point situation we had been using,” says Marc Ehinger, Tecan’s Head of Global IT Infrastructure. “We were looking for much more flexibility and to centralize as much as possible in our data center in Zurich. Our goal is for IT to be a fluid resource that we can flex and assign as we need.”

Our new common architecture (SteelFusion) means we can now manage IT resources centrally. We’ve offloaded the burden of managing local infrastructure from branch staff. We can move applications, servers or storage around and optimize our SLAs and it is now much easier to scale our business. Whereas before it took around 6 months, we can now set up a new branch office with servers and storage in a few weeks. I don’t see how we could have done this without Riverbed. Marc Ehinger, Head of Global IT Infrastructure, Tecan

JLL has more than 230 corporate offices and a global workforce of 58,000 providing services in 80 countries for a property portfolio of 3.4 billion square feet. JLL’s network is going hybrid as the company moves apps and services to the cloud and replaces its MPLS network with dual high-speed Internet links at each office for more bandwidth at a better price. “Even with 100 mbps connections, without SteelHead, people would be screaming about poor application performance,” says Joe Ryan, Chief Technology Officer, Americas, for JLL. “Delivering business-critical apps over the Internet saves us millions without sacrificing performance. Riverbed makes it possible,” says Edward Wagoner, Chief Information Officer, Americas, for JLL.

When we go out and talk with others in the industry, we certainly think we’re far out in front. The next-generation WAN is getting a lot of press now. We view our investment in technology as an investment in our people. We’re always out there looking at what’s new, what’s possible, and making sure we’re taking advantage of it. Riverbed is a part of that. Joe Ryan, Chief Technology Officer, Americas, JLL

Allianz, with more than 148,000 employees in 70+ countries, is the 31st largest company in the world, offering insurance and other services to 83 million clients. “Long page load times and slow application speeds affected our productivity,” says Neval Bircaner, IT Governance Supervisor for Allianz Turkey. “Whenever an application performance issue occurred, it was often difficult to pinpoint the root cause. It was hard to determine whether the application performance issues were due to the applications, the network, or our database. We were also interested in ensuring that our external partners were satisfied with our systems.”

It is now much easier to identify issues with the network or application themselves. In some cases, problems that took a long time to solve can now be fixed in minutes. Following the deployment of SteelCentral solutions, our customers have seen a significant improvement in performance. Riverbed has made a positive impact for us by helping us to considerably improve the customer experience. Neval Bircaner, IT Governance Supervisor, Allianz

Carilion Clinic is a non-profit providing health care to nearly one million patients in southwest Virginia. Core apps centralized in Roanoke support radiological services, electronic medical records, etc. To ensure the needed performance for patient care, Carilion had originally purchased OC3 network circuits. “An OC3 to one hospital was costing us $12,000 per month,” says Ed Eades, a Network Engineer. “When we put it down to a DS3, it costs about $4,000 per month and that’s just one site." Carilion did a proof-of-concept with SteelHead, and are now seeing in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 times the throughput. A replication that took nearly 24 hours now took less than four.

We’re a non-profit, so any money we do make we put back into the organization to deliver services to our patients. Riverbed has helped us reduce our operating costs so we can take the money we would have spent on bandwidth and put it back into services for the community. Mike Smith, IT Director, Carilion Clinic