WAN acceleration smells good to Coty

IDG News Service — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 06:36:55 -0700

Glen Dalgleish, vice president of infrastructure services at global perfumer Coty Inc., well remembers why he and his staff had implemented WAN acceleration technology last January: to improve Internet download speeds for some 6,000 users worldwide.

With the technology from Riverbed Technology Inc. in place, users in Europe or Asia could download a 50MB multimedia presentation on a hot new fragrance in less than five minutes -- a big improvement over the 30 minutes it had taken before the acceleration fix.

"It is extremely potent technology," Dalgleish said in a recent interview. "People were calling and saying, 'This can't be right.... Is something wrong? The downloads are too FAST.'

"With a smile, we said, 'It is what it is...,'" Dalgleish said, recounting how IT staffers explained the speed boost to users.

Dalgleish, who started working for the New York-based Coty nearly a year ago, credits San Francisco-based Riverbed Technology and Orange Communications SA, the network provider that has worked with Coty for more than seven years, for the improvements. Orange is a brand of France Telecom in Paris.

In all, Riverbed and Orange has spent about $500,000 to install about 50 of Riverbed's Steelhead Appliances of various sizes in offices around the globe. The devices talk to one big Steelhead at Coty's data center in Sanford, N.C., Dalgleish said. Coty expects its investment should be paid back in 18 months.

The big advantage? Coty didn't need to expand network capacity to handle exploding amounts of video and other multimedia data, he said. While adding bandwidth might not be too expensive in New York, trying to boost throughput by even a modest amount in some countries in Eastern Europe can be exorbitant, he noted. With the Riverbed technology in place, throughout on some network links dropped from 90% to 60%.

With the improved efficiency, Dalgleish has been able to remove about 12 caching servers throughout the world, saving money on the software licensing costs for those servers. Now, when a user needs a file, the data comes straight from the data center, ensuring that the user gets the most recent version.

One problem Dalgleish encountered involved several legacy applications that did not work with the acceleration software and would time out. The applications were not mission critical and affected very few users, so they were excluded from the acceleration pathway and still transmit at their older, slower pace. Because the issue was minor, Dalgleish did not investigate the problem.

Coty chose Riverbed's technology over several others, including Cisco Systems Inc., Dalgleish said. Orange had recommended Riverbed after using the technology itself; Dalgleish praised Orange for recognizing that the acceleration market is growing and offers clear benefits for network users. "Because of what Orange did, it helps me want to stay with Orange," he said.

Now, Dalgleish said he wants to test Riverbed's Steelhead mobile application to port optimization to several hundred employee laptops. "You could use it from your hotel room," he said.

Coty's experience with acceleration is not unusual, analysts said. Since WAN optimization technology began appearing five years ago, it has continued to gain popularity at least in part because of success stories like Coty's.

"The market is still growing, and we have not seen a slowdown in end-user demand for WAN optimization," said Robert Whiteley, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. "As IT [departments] look to trim the fat from budgets, they often turn to consolidation projects, which increases the need for WAN optimization to accelerate connections to centralized data center resources," he said.

Whiteley said Riverbed is in the top tier of WAN optimization vendors, along with Cisco and Blue Coat Systems Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif.; Juniper Networks Inc., also in Sunnyvale; and Silver Peak Systems Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif.

The Industry Standard - WAN acceleration smells good to Coty - Comments

WAN acceleration smells good to Coty