Riverbed SD-WAN Solution Connects OpenEye to Its Pharmaceutical-Design Cloud Platform in Minutes

SAN FRANCISCO – May 4, 2017 – Riverbed Technology today announced that OpenEye Scientific, a developer of large-scale molecular modeling applications and toolkits, is using Riverbed^® SteelConnect^® to quickly connect its team members and global biopharmaceutical community to its Orion cloud-based drug discovery platform. SteelConnect, Riverbed’s software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) and cloud networking solution, allows OpenEye to establish a new network connection in minutes, compared to the weeks or months required previously. As interest in OpenEye’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) products grows, SteelConnect enables OpenEye to elastically scale-up SaaS operations for its customers and developers. This cloud-bursting strategy eliminates the time and cost constraints of buying and managing legacy networking infrastructure.

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Watch Now: OpenEye Discusses Use of Riverbed SteelConnect Video and Case Study

OpenEye’s software, headquartered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is used by computational, medicinal, and synthetic chemists at some of the world’s largest biopharmaceutical companies for early stage drug discovery. During most of its 20-year history, the company sold its technology in the form of software development toolkits (SDKs) for developers and licensed applications for scientists. Recently, the company has begun delivering more of its technology in the form of SaaS offerings, with a cloud-native pharmaceutical design platform called Orion that resides on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The positive response to Orion from the global biopharmaceutical community presented OpenEye’s IT and developer teams with the challenge of how to quickly and affordably connect a growing user population into the platform. Connecting users via the company’s Cisco-based network was cost-prohibitive. “Our current hardware just would not scale to support this,” said Craig Bruce, a scientific software developer at OpenEye. “We would have needed to buy a lot more hardware for a rather large price, and scalability would have been incredibly costly, slow and difficult.”

Riverbed SteelConnect provided the simplicity and flexibility OpenEye needed to cost-effectively expand and manage its network, while also integrating with AWS.  “SteelConnect’s tight integration with AWS was very appealing to us,” Bruce said.

OpenEye installed its first instance of SteelConnect in its AWS virtual private cloud (VPC) in less than an hour.

“We can now make network connections within minutes, and this was unthinkable before,” said Bruce. “The ability to enable a new connection so quickly, instead of the weeks or months it took in the past, is really important for the success of our SaaS offerings.  SteelConnect enables us to be far more agile, which is critical to growing our business.”

For OpenEye’s SaaS customers, SteelConnect represents one more way that OpenEye is working to help them innovate more quickly. “Our SaaS solutions, supported by SteelConnect, save our customers both time and money and ultimately will enable them to get new drugs to market sooner,” Bruce concluded.

OpenEye plans to further expand its use of SteelConnect, including leveraging the SD-WAN solution in a new dedicated DevOps space, to support additional installations of Orion, and to connect new offices as OpenEye continues to grow.

Continued SteelConnect Momentum and Innovation.

SteelConnect, initially launched as an early access offering in April 2016, is the industry’s first and only SD-WAN product that unifies deployment and orchestration of hybrid WANs, branch networks, and cloud environments, including one-click connectivity and optimization into AWS and Microsoft Azure. SteelConnect also enables zero-touch provisioning, allowing an enterprise to set-up a global network and connect to the cloud in minutes, and easy ongoing network management that provides the ability to make network or business/application policy changes with a few clicks of a mouse. Riverbed announced general availability of SteelConnect 2.0 in September 2016 with many new features, including integrated visibility with Riverbed SteelCentral. Riverbed’s SD-WAN solution also provides seamless platform integration with the market-leading WAN optimization solution Riverbed SteelHead solution, and streamlined data center integration for large-scale deployments. Riverbed’s 300+ SD-WAN customers span across a wide range of industries globally, including retail, manufacturing, healthcare, professional services, finance, technology, and many more.

For more information on Riverbed’s SD-WAN solutions, visit

https://www.riverbed.com/solutions/sd-wan.html