Want to better support global collaboration within your organization? In the case study, you’ll discover how Golder Associates deployed a centralized Intranet portal with a wide-area acceleration solution that delivered LAN-like speed across the WAN. By deploying Riverbed Steelhead appliances into their existing Cisco-based network, they ensured their vast mobile workforce access to the same resources workers had at headquarters.
Case Study: Golder Associates® ®In BRIEF Riverbed Steelhead Appliances and Steelhead Mobile Provide Real-Time Collaboration Everywhere for Leading Environmental Industry Planning Organization?? Professional Services (Environmental Consulting) Golder Associates is one of the most respected engineering and environmental services groups in the world. Founded in 1960, Golder now employs over 5,000 people who oper-Challenges ate from more than 150 offices located throughout Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America. Golder's knowledge of local cultures, languages and regula-?? Improve client service and global tory requirements, combined with their global resources, makes it possible for them to help collaboration by creating a central- clients achieve their business objectives around the world and at home.ized SharePoint Intranet?? Empower mobile workers with the Through their network of local offices, Golder completed over 12,000 projects last year same performance as users in the HQ and has more than 6,000 clients. Services include air quality, environmental engineering, and branch offices geophysics, cultural sciences, geosciences, and risk analysis. Golder is consistently ranked ?? Achieve seamless integration of an as one of the top engineering and environmental services firms by Engineering News acceleration system with Golder's Record magazine, and is considered "one of the best firms to work for" in Africa, Australia, Cisco-based routing infrastructure Canada, and the US for the past 5 years.
Solution Challenge: Enabling Collaboration for a Global Workforce ?? Steelhead appliances were deployed As a global corporation with many large scale projects, Golder was attuned to the challenges in over 55 offices that their employees face in worldwide projects. Alison Ramsley, Golder's Leader of Global IT Services noted, "We are a company of knowledge workers. For our business, the ability to ?? Steelhead appliances to be deployed put the right talent on the right project - regardless of where the person or the project might in most of the remaining 100 offices be - is exactly what helps us succeed. Our IT ?? Steelhead Mobile software deployed "Soon after we started address- infrastructure is designed to support the way to accelerate mobile workers our engineers & scientists need to work.ing the problem of performance in ?? Central Management Console (CMC) the branch office, we thought we "Not long ago we decided that, in order to deployed to simplify management of support collaboration better, we needed to Steelhead appliances should start doing the same thing deploy a centralized Intranet portal. Based for users who are on the road." on our discussion with the IT services firm Benefits Avanade, we decided to create the system ?? Centralized Intranet provides LAN-like based on Microsoft SharePoint. At the same time, we noticed an overall increase in our performance in branch offices around WAN data traffic as well. It wasn't just document collaboration, even though Office docs the world are the bulk of what we transfer. Exchange, Veritas NetBackup, and AutoCAD files and ?? Mobile workers get the same LAN-like data were demanding a tremendous amount of network resources, and slowing opera-experience as employees in branch tions down for all our employees. We pretty quickly understood that, if we were to go to a office centralized document management system, we had to do something out of the ordinary to ?? WAN backup traffic reduced by ensure that application performance was where we needed it to be."almost 40% Alison added, "By the nature of our work, we travel a lot. Our colleagues are on the road all the time, at client or project sites. They can be onsite anywhere from weeks to months. Soon after we started addressing the problem of performance in the branch office, we thought we should start doing the same thing for users who are on the road. After all, they need to be just as productive as users who are in the branch office.".
Meeting the Needs of a Globally Distributed NetworkJoe Potegal, Senior Network Engineer, also went into detail about Golder's network envi-ronment. "Well, we certainly are a global company. Given that we have offices in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, Africa, Asia, and all over South America, you can imagine "Whatever wide-area data services that maintaining consistency in connectiv- solution we chose for acceleration ity and pe... [download for more]
