Releases

posted on 27 February 2008 12:53

26 February 2008 – Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced that the Sidel Group has selected and deployed Riverbed® Steelhead® WDS appliances.

The deployment, which is taking place at 43 locations worldwide, allows Sidel to improve global business processes, collaboration and productivity associated with its highly integrated and complex packaging system.

The Sidel Group, together with Tetrapak and De Laval, is one of the three divisions of Tetra Laval, which employs 30,000 workers. It has over 50 years of experience in bottling solutions, from the beginning to the end of the bottling process of various beverages, ranging from mineral waters to beer, milk, fruit juices and sensitive beverages needing sterile treatments. A bottling line features a high degree of differentiation and complexity, and has anywhere from six to twelve machines that are produced and installed by Sidel. The Group has installed more than 27,000 bottling machines in 191 countries, which differ according to the type of beverages and quality of materials used for bottling. To exceed customer expectations, Sidel’s highly distributed workforce relies on up-to-the-minute information and immediate hand-off of processes between its offices in Europe, Africa, the United States, Asia and Oceania.

Its biggest challenge is creating an efficient network for the transmission of data for its distributed workforce - sales, engineering, fabrications, project management, installation activities and after-sales assistance. In addition, Sidel’s corporate network is extended to its partners and customers. Machines installed onsite with customers are connected to Sidel’s headquarters for diagnostics, remote monitoring and performance assessment.

Sidel was unable to guarantee access to corporate data for its distributed workforce, including mobile workers and strategic partners. Upon first review, Sidel thought increasing its bandwidth whenever needed would be the best option. The group quickly determined that they risked spending a considerable amount of money without the guarantee of obtaining acceptable performance and speeds in remote locations. This dissatisfaction of this process prompted Sidel to review various WDS solutions.

Sidel’s review took into account economic concerns, such as the cost and the foreseeability of the required investments; technical requirements, which include the ease of adoption, the reliability of the alternatives, the degree of complexity in the products, the capabilities to support mobile workers and the ability of the products to facilitate the consolidation of IT resources; the presence of extra features, such as security functions; and finally, the performance and reporting capabilities of the alternatives. Sidel selected Riverbed Steelhead appliances for their ability to deliver superior performance, reliability, and ease and speed of integration, installation and customisation. In addition, the Steelhead appliances offer the maximum flexibility and scalability, which allows Sidel to obtain high performance for its applications over the WAN now and in the future.

“We chose Riverbed because they delivered the best combination of speed and ease-of-use and simplicity,” said Egidio Ghinelli, vice president of information technology at Sidel. The group was especially impressed by the immediate user feedback received upon implementation of the Steelhead appliances. According to Ghinelli, this is the most significant parameter for evaluating the real efficiency of a WAN: the users instantly experienced significant improvements in performance.

“After completing the installation, we expect to reduce our bandwidth costs, but the main benefit that we get from Riverbed is LAN-like performance for our remote users now and in the future, thanks to Riverbed’s inherent flexibility”, points out Ghinelli.
Steelhead Products

Riverbed’s WDS solutions enable organisations of all sizes to overcome a host of severe problems, including poor application performance and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites. By speeding the performance of applications between data centres, remote offices and mobile workers by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times, Riverbed’s award-winning Steelhead WDS products enable companies to consolidate IT, improve backup and replication processes to ensure data integrity, and improve staff productivity and collaboration. Steelhead products have been deployed in organisations ranging from the world’s largest corporations with offices around the globe to small companies with a couple of sites that are just miles apart. To learn more, view Riverbed’s demo: www.riverbed.com/pr/jack.