BANGALORE: Riverbed Technology, the IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications and storage,  announced that Milacron Inc., a  global supplier of plastics-processing technologies and industrial fluids, has deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances worldwide to increase application acceleration for its global organization. 

According to the press release, the deployment of the Riverbed solution has enabled Milacron's employees to collaborate faster while allowing Milacron to avoid expensive bandwidth upgrades.   

Milacron has over 3,200 employees and major manufacturing facilities in North America, Europe and Asia.  In an effort to improve manufacturing processes, Milacron rolled out an ERP global application/system. Upon implementation, Milacron's employees discovered that their ability to access applications was slow and unmanageable. For example, employees were experiencing a 17-minute wait to transfer data within Germany, which slowed collaboration between sites and worker productivity.   The increasing number of end-user complaints to the IT department prompted Milacron to look for a solution to accelerate application performance.

To support continued growth in distributed locations and increase infrastructure performance, the company had two options - either upgrade its 256k WAN link or deploy a WAN optimization solution.  After determining that the cost of upgrading the WAN link was expensive and it would only be a partial solution to the main cause of poor application performance and latency, the company started researching WAN optimization solutions more closely.  "There were two challenges we wanted addressed when looking into WAN optimization solutions – the ability to accelerate applications for global employees and cost efficiency," said James Polce, manager of global data communications at Milacron.  "When Riverbed offered a free trial of the solution we jumped on the opportunity to evaluate the Steelhead appliances in Germany, where our employees were feeling the most pain.  We were immediately impressed with the results."

Milacron decided to deploy Steelhead appliances at 10 sites worldwide to accelerate the performance of its most used applications, including JD Edwards Enterprise 1, Hyperion and Microsoft Windows and Exchange.   By avoiding bandwidth upgrades, Milacron eliminated $7,000 a month in expenses. 

Milacron was also impressed by the ease of deployment of the Steelhead appliances.  "The implementation process was simpler than we expected.  We literally placed the appliances into production in minutes and they worked.  We haven't touched the Steelhead appliances since we placed them in the network.  The ease of use is resulting in operational cost savings as our IT team can keep their focus on larger IT challenges."