IN BRIEF
Industry
Challenges
- Accelerate application performance
- Reduce file transfer time
- Centralize IT infrastructure
Solution
- Six Riverbed Steelhead appliances
Benefits
- File transfers cut from hours to minutes
- Successfully avoided a bandwidth upgrade
- Enabled data center consolidation
- Reduced cost and complexity of future remote IT deployments
Le Coq Sportif
Riverbed Steelhead Products Solve Bandwidth And Application Performance Problems For Leading Textile Manufacturing Company
Challenge: Consolidating Applications for a Distributed Workforce without Performance Compromise
With eight offices and a growing number of remote employees, Le Coq Sportif faced many IT challenges. Mr. Schmitt, IT manager at Le Coq Sportif, explained the situation in detail. “With an increasingly distributed workforce, collaboration is consistently becoming a bigger challenge. We use Microsoft Dynamics as our ERP solution, and given the nature of our business – quick turnaround times, varying product lifetimes with intense design elements – we are heavy users of PLM tools like Centric and other graphic tools. Most importantly, employees everywhere regularly share files, especially large graphic and design files.”
Schmitt recalled the time when the users started to call daily, complaining about poor application performance and long download times. He said, “It started when the remote office in Paris grew from six to 28 users. We didn’t want to create additional IT infrastructure at the office, but with the increased number of users accessing applications over the wide area network (WAN) performance began to suffer.
It was taking over an hour to download critical information and that affected employee morale. Business productivity was reduced and users became impatient and frustrated.” He continued, “We wanted to leverage existing resources more efficiently and guessed that bandwidth upgrades would do nothing to guarantee reliable performance of business applications.”
Schmitt also discussed Le Coq Sportif’s consolidation project. “We wanted to simplify our current IT infrastructure from remote offices to a centralized site. But we knew that this could lead to performance issues. After all, when you move data further away from the end user, applications typically take longer to deliver.”
Solution: Riverbed’s WAN Optimization Solutions
Le Coq Sportif first considered upgrading its bandwidth and spoke to France Telecom. Bandwidth upgrades, however, were infeasible both from an availability and cost standpoint. And it was also clear that just adding bandwidth wouldn’t necessarily solve the performance problem.
They considered WANScaler from Citrix, but the IT department quickly discounted the product for two reasons: it lacked the maturity to tackle complex WAN issues and still required a costly 2-3X bandwidth upgrade. Schmitt said, “We came across Riverbed through a reference from one of our partners. We tested Riverbed, and found that it addressed all our issues, in terms of application acceleration, bandwidth and cost savings, and usability.”
Le Coq Sportif deployed six Steelhead appliances across multiple locations in France, Spain, Italy and Taiwan. Schmitt noted, “The results were impressive. The file transfer time was cut from hours to minutes. Subsequent file edits and retransfers were reduced to just a few seconds - a performance that was practically LAN-like.”
He continued, “At the same time, the Steelhead appliance was optimizing our bandwidth. On average the Steelhead appliance was eliminating 65% to 75% of our high-volume application traffic, substantially increasing our WAN capacity, with no additional investment in actual physical capacity.” Schmitt also talked about the success of the consolidation project, “We were able to centralize and boost the performance of our IT infrastructure successfully, without compromising employee productivity.”
Impressed with Riverbed’s solution Schmitt concluded, “Riverbed Steelhead appliances have no equal in terms of improved application performance, simplicity and ease-of-use. Our overall IT costs have been cut and the product has exceeded our expectations in every way.”
Benefits: A More Productive Workforce and Centralized Data
Riverbed Steelhead appliances enabled Le Coq Sportif to accelerate application performance for a globally distributed workforce. In addition, they accrued significant bandwidth savings. Schmitt noted, “The performance of critical applications improved significantly. Within two weeks of deployment, we were able to speed up data transfers by 30x.“
Talking about bandwidth optimization Schmitt noted, “We found Riverbed to be much more effective at optimizing bandwidth than any of the alternatives. The combination of bandwidth optimization coupled with protocol acceleration resulted in a significant increase in throughput across the company’s global WAN.” He continued, “Steelhead appliances have also enabled us to centralize our IT infrastructure at our corporate data center, from where all the remote sites can access critical data and documentation. We no longer need to maintain IT infrastructure at all our branch offices worldwide.”
Schmitt concluded, “The project proved to be a huge success for our organization. We achieved significant results quickly with minimum effort from our side. Above all, our employees are very satisfied with file download speeds.”
Return on Investment: Savings now and in the future
“Many organizations assess ROI by using financial costs, and for us these hard savings are large enough to pay for the investment.” Schmitt noted, “Financial savings came both from the avoidance of bandwidth upgrades and the reduction in IT management costs. By reducing the amount of data traversing the WAN link, the savings in bandwidth costs alone paid for our investment in Riverbed.”
He continued, “Due to the consolidation of the IT infrastructure at our corporate data center, we experienced a quantum reduction in manpower costs as well. The more interesting savings come from our future growth - we are expanding rapidly, opening offices in Taiwan and two other countries. My cost and time to set up IT in each of these new locations is a fraction of what it was previously. And our current bandwidth is enough to handle this expansion.”
“But the qualitative and productivity benefits are much more strategic than the quantifiable direct benefits,” continued Schmitt, “Riverbed has substantially improved the end-user experience for employees. Productivity numbers would be hard to collect, but even if we save our employees just 15 minutes per day because of the faster application performance, that can translate into more meaningful collaboration across offices.”
SUMMARY
Le Coq Sportif is a leading lifetsyle manufacturer with a workforce spread across multiple locations. Their most critical requirement was to enable effective real-time collaboration across offices to improve productivity and business agility. In addition, the company wanted to centralize IT infrastructure while expanding the staff in remote offices.
Looking for a comprehensive wide area network (WAN) optimization solution, Le Coq Sportif deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances. Using Riverbed, Le Coq Sportif achieved faster data sharing, accelerated application performance, optimized bandwidth utilization, and radically improved throughput across the WAN. Le Coq Sportif was also able to centralize IT infrastructure at their corporate data center in Strasbourg while avoiding additional bandwidth upgrades and without compromising application performance to remote workers.
Le Coq Sportif enjoys strong brand recognition and a solid global reputation. Based on its historical presence and the high value component of its name, Le Coq Sportif seeks to regain its market position by focusing on product and technology development and creating new designs which impart to the consumer the emotions and excitement of sport.
Riverbed has no equal in terms of improved application performance, simplicity and ease of use. The product was incredibly simple to install, and has exceeded our expectations in terms of performance improvement and usability.
The project proved to be a huge success for our organization. We achieved significant results quickly with minimum effort from our side.
By reducing the amount of data traversing the WAN link, the savings in bandwidth costs alone paid for our investment in Riverbed.
Thanks to Riverbed my cost and time to set up IT in new locations is a fraction of what it was previously. And our current bandwidth is enough to handle this expansion.
