The retail environment today is fiercely competitive. Companies must simultaneously accelerate their product development cycles and cut development costs. These organizations have the additional complexity that design, development, testing, and manufacturing rarely take place in the same location anymore. Manufacturers are dependent on their WAN for communication among these different teams in different locations, often spread around the world.

Using Riverbed WDS solutions, retail organizations can eliminate cost and complexity from their IT infrastructure while allowing their employees to be more productive. From employees involved in design of electronics, consumables, or clothing to sales, finance, and operational employees, any user on the network can benefit from improved collaboration over the wide-area network. With Riverbed, these organizations can also cut costs that impact the bottom line, such as distributed IT servers (that in turn require more IT support) and additional bandwidth upgrades.

A global clothing brand

This brand-name powerhouse was aggressively growing its organization through a global acquisition strategy. At the same time, the organization wanted to control its costs in order to maintain price competitiveness. With this dual-pronged strategy in place, it was important that all employees – including those of newly acquired brands – were able to easily tie in to the organization's core systems. In the future, the organization wanted to roll out new applications in a centralized manner.

Using Riverbed, this global clothing brand was able to achieve 20 to 40 times faster applications across its global WAN. All employees – design, sales, finance, HR, and operations – experienced productivity boots, and the IT team could achieve its strategic goals of centralized application deployment as well.