Polish Manufacturer AmicaPicks Riverbed's Steelhead Solution

Amica Wronki, a Poland-based manufacturer of household appliances, has deployed Riverbed Technology’s Steelhead Appliances and Steelhead Mobile in order to accelerate collaboration and improve workforce productivity.

 

Riverbed (News - Alert) Technology is an IT infrastructure performance company a family of wide area network optimization solutions, which frees businesses from common IT constraints. These solutions enhance application performance, enabling consolidation and providing enterprise-wide network and application visibility.

 

These features eliminate the need to increase bandwidth, storage or servers, the company said.

 

According to Amica Wronki, the company produces more than one million products every year. The company has a workforce of more than 2,000 in 13 offices spread across the world. It sells its products in more than 40 countries.

 

In order to cope up with company’s operations and communications, Amica earlier was depending on local ERP systems, SAP (News - Alert), Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint.

 

Amica wanted its users to migrate from an ERP system based at each branch office to a centrally hosted SAP application. The company had to overcome the issue of slow application access across the network. For this, it had to either upgrade bandwidth or install additional servers.

 

However, it wanted to avoid up gradation of bandwidth as well as installation of additional servers due to the costs and complexity involved in these procedures. Therefore, the company was in search of a WAN optimization solution.

 

With the successful deployment of Riverbed’s WAN optimization solution, Amica could successfully migrate key applications as well as data backups to its data centers, thereby accelerating application access, improving employee collaboration and productivity. The deployment also eliminated costly bandwidth upgrade, as well as reduced operating costs, said officials with Amica.

 

According to Amica, the installation of Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances at three data centers in Poland and three branch offices, and deploying Steelhead Mobile for remote workers, has enabled the company to experience four-fold improvement in file accessing, downloading, quick removal of local ERP systems at those branch office locations, and more. In addition, the company has also removed two local servers and two data storage devices from the branch offices.

 

“Riverbed has allowed us to be more nimble in our approach to IT and infrastructure,” said Jerzy Zielinski, director of the information technology department at Inteco Business Solutions. “When organizations like ours can do more with their existing network, we immediately have an advantage -- because, in addition to increasing productivity, our costs are reduced, which allows us to invest back into the business to support growth and new opportunities.”