Business value - not just WAN Acceleration

By accelerating applications, WDS provides customers with much more than just happier end users or an optimized WAN. Faster application performance actually helps business solve many of the major challenges they are facing today. With wide-area data services, businesses can make the long distances between remote offices, mobile workers, and business HQ disappear. And when those distances disappear, businesses can take advantage of their human and technology resources in dramatically different ways. With WDS, business can:

• Improve employee productivity. Slow application performance across the WAN can be crippling to employee performance. Many workers have to endure long wait times to complete a transaction or download a file – even up to several hours. In some cases, access to data and applications across the WAN is so poor that it affects an organization's ability to conduct business. Engineers can't collaborate on large CAD files across great distances, so local contractors need to be hired. Call center applications are slow, so more call center agents need to be hired. Riverbed products accelerate applications over the WAN by 10x, 50x, and up to 100x in some cases, dramatically improving the productivity of remote workers and enabling your company to do more with less.
• Radically improve business processes. A core focus for many businesses, WDS can help accelerate operations by reducing the time to complete repetitive operations. Enterprises embracing a "follow the sun" operations model also benefit from faster data transfer to remote locations. Resource planning (ERP) systems and product lifecycle (PLM) platforms can be tightly integrated with distributed employees – even mobile workers – and at the same time opened up to suppliers. In all, businesses can deliver their product faster to market while spending less on the IT required to do so.
• Tap global markets, with less cost. A key objective for many companies today is to reach out beyond their existing markets. But the required investments in people and infrastructure often make that impossible. With WDS, businesses can tap the opportunity without the investment. That's because WDS allows you to leverage your people and infrastructure as if they were all in one location, no matter how far and wide they are distributed.
• Enable outsourcing and distributed collaboration. With WDS, outsourcing and distributed collaboration of employees works far more efficiently. Users can work on massive design documents, large contracts, and important applications as if they were working in the same room. For branch offices and mobile workers alike,version control problems can be eliminated, wait times for large data sets are reduced by an order of magnitude, and communications can be streamlined as never before possible.
• Provide infrastructure for an agile business. Requirements in business change quickly these days. Typically, IT infrastructure cannot react quickly enough. But with WDS, IT can change the game. WDS allows IT infrastructure to be much more nimble: data centers can be anywhere – and can be moved in a tenth of the time; new applications can be rolled out faster; centralized implementations of servers and storage can serve global users with less investment. The end result is that IT can be more responsive to business needs without a ballooning budget.
• Secure critical company and customer data. WDS enables strategic and tactical efforts to protect company data against loss, theft, or disaster. WDS can help eliminate insecure remote tape backup in remote offices, and at the same time empower faster, cheaper replication from primary data centers to secondary data centers. All of this means that data is more secure at a lower cost.