Le Coq Sportif deploys Riverbed Steelhead

19 Sep '08

4 min read

Riverbed Technology announced that Le Coq Sportif, a leading France-based international sports and lifestyle textile manufacturer, has deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances to accelerate application performance, optimize bandwidth utilization and enable IT consolidation without application performance compromise to remote workers.

Due to an increasingly distributed and growing workforce, as well as Le Coq Sportif's reliance on the seamless sharing of large graphic and design files between sites, the company sought to improve application performance to increase collaboration and improve the user experience.

Le Coq Sportif selected the Riverbed WDS solution because it addressed all of their application acceleration, bandwidth savings and usability needs. Many data transfers between Le Coq Sportif employees now move 30 times faster -- a reduction from hours to minutes -- and subsequent file edits and retransfers have been further reduced to just a few seconds.

The Riverbed Steelhead appliance has also been able to help Le Coq Sportif cut costs by eliminating 65 to 75 percent of Le Coq Sportif's high-volume application traffic, increasing wide area network (WAN) capacity with no additional investment in physical capacity.

Riverbed WDS solutions proved to offer greater ROI than the alternatives of either undergoing a costly bandwidth upgrade or the implementation of other WDS products that were considered, such as Citrix WANScaler. Steve Schmitt, IT manager at Le Coq Sportif, says, "Many organizations assess ROI by using financial costs, and for us these hard savings are large enough to pay for the investment. Financial savings come both from the avoidance of costly bandwidth upgrades and the reduction in IT management costs. By reducing the amount of data traversing the WAN, the savings in bandwidth costs alone paid for our investment in Riverbed."

Le Coq Sportif also consolidated the company's existing IT infrastructure to a centralized site to improve data management. Riverbed Steelhead appliances allow Le Coq Sportif to avoid the performance issues generally associated with moving data further away from the end user. This results in increased collaborative abilities among the distributed workforce, ultimately allowing Le Coq Sportif to increase the size of its employee base without worrying about the performance issues typically encountered by a distributed workforce.

Schmitt continued, "We found Riverbed to be much more effective at optimizing bandwidth than any of the alternatives. We were able to improve bandwidth capacity utilization, and no longer needed costly WAN upgrades. The combination of bandwidth optimization, coupled with protocol acceleration, resulted in a significant increase in throughput across our global WAN."

The Riverbed WDS solutions will support future growth at Le Coq Sportif, while continuing to improve IT productivity with minimal additional financial investment. Schmitt says, "Even more impressive cost savings will come from our future growth -- we are expanding rapidly, opening offices in Taiwan and two other countries. Our cost and time to set up IT in each of these new locations is a fraction of what it would have been previous to the WDS deployment. And our current bandwidth is enough to handle this expansion. Future cost savings are potentially larger than even current savings."

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