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In business today, even the smallest companies often have 2 or 3 offices. Sometimes they are in the same city or the same state, but they might be across the world. Larger companies might have 10, 500, or 5,000 branch offices to manage and monitor.
With business constantly reaching out to new locations, how do you enable your distributed employees to communicate, collaborate, and report back on what’s going on? Of course, that’s what your applications and your network infrastructure are for – but are they really meeting your performance needs?
If your organization is like most, everyone says that IT infrastructure is either too slow or costs too much to manage. Employees expect better response time, and executives are pressuring the IT team to cut costs at the same time by consolidating servers or reducing bandwidth costs. This seems like a no-win situation, doesn’t it?
Well, it doesn’t have to be. Companies of all sizes – from all over the world – have been using Riverbed WDS solutions to dramatically accelerate the performance of applications across their wide-area networks. With this solution in place, applica-tions can go up to 100x faster. That type of performance enables your organization to work as if everyone were in the same room. Take a look at these common results:
Any application – including email, Web apps, large design files – can be shared across the world in seconds instead of minutes or hours
Consolidation becomes a reality – without impacting the productivity of your branch users
Backup and replication can be completed in 1/10th of the previous time required – ensuring your business can respond quickly and more reliably in the face of disaster.
Bandwidth upgrades are pushed out – optimization of current bandwidth lets you push out upgrades, potentially for years.
Riverbed Steelhead® Appliances Deployed by a Global Retailer to Improve Employee Productivity, Centralize Applications, and Ease WAN-based Backup
Liz Claiborne Inc. designs and markets an extensive range of branded women’s and men’s apparel, accessories and fragrance products. The company has a diverse portfolio of quality brands that are available domestically and internationally via wholesale and retail channels. Popular globally-known brands in the Liz Claiborne portfolio include DKNY, Kenneth Cole NY, Kate Spade, Mexx, and Monet. The more than 40 brands in the Liz Claiborne Inc. portfolio are available at over 30,000 points of sale worldwide.
Liz Claiborne (www.lizclaiborneinc.com) has locations across the globe, including distribution centers, and management, sales, finance, and operations offices. Sites are located in North America, Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, India, China and Southeast Asia. The business is expanding in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia due to both acquisition and natu-ral growth. To accommodate that growth and integrate worldwide business operations, the company sought to deploy both custom applications designed for the global retail business and improve response times of existing applications such as their ERP application, and Microsoft Office, Exchange 2003, CommVault backup and SharePoint, over the wide area network (WAN).
Challenge: Enabling Employees To Be Productive, Wherever They Are
Liz Claiborne is in a period of immense change. As recently noted to the financial community in its earnings announcements, Claiborne is “committed to strategic acquisitions as part of our growth strategy.“ Yet, an aggressive growth strategy presents challenges for maintaining a high level of worker productivity.
“Our organization is very much a distributed organization. We have sales, finance, operations, and marketing professionals all over the world. With our successful growth strategy in place, it’s critical that all our employees – no matter where they are – can access the key files and applications they need to get their jobs done,” noted Gary Williams, Director of End User Computing. ”We started to notice performance issues due to chattier applications and larger data, both domestically and inter-nationally. It would take many, many minutes to simply access a 1 Megabyte or larger financial spreadsheet or other standard office document.”
Rakesh Patel, Technical Architect, continued, “In addition, we were seeing potential performance issues crop up across many of our important applications, not just files. SharePoint document management, Exchange email, CommVault backup, ERP, and finance applications all were not performing up to our expectations over the WAN. And given that strategically we wanted to move to more centralized applications, we knew we needed to address these WAN application performance issues.”
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