FM Logistic, an international leader in warehousing, transport and packaging, is using Riverbed SteelHead to reduce global network costs while improving application performance and business agility.
Based in France, FM Logistic is a French logistics business, founded in 1967. The company operates in 13 countries, with a staff of 21,800 and more than 700 applications running on its network.
FM Logistic completed a major upgrade of the network in 2011, using over 70 Riverbed SteelHead appliances to optimize WAN efficiency and deliver a five-fold increase in bandwidth.
In the year since it was deployed, Riverbed SteelHead with its WAN-Optimization and application-defined SD-WAN (software-defined WAN) capabilities, delivered dramatic improvements in employee productivity by increasing network resiliency, accelerating application performance and reducing network costs worldwide, leading to a payback period of 12 months.
Michel Boulay, Enterprise Network Architect, FM Logistic said, “The WAN optimization project was extremely valuable to the business, but I was concerned with backups and outages. Being disconnected for even 1-2 seconds can mean users lose 15 minutes reconnecting and recovering the lost data. That can create a huge business impact when you’re talking about 1,000 users.”
FM Logistic embarked on a project leveraging Riverbed’s Path Selection capability, a key component of Riverbed’s SD-WAN solution.
FM Logistic was one of the first customers to test and deploy this solution resulting in a win-win innovation partnership for both organizations.
The use of Path Selection automatically mapped FM Logistic’s 700 plus applications into business-relevant groups. Once applications were mapped, Boulay’s team was then able to create a hierarchy based on their criticality to the business.
This ensured that performance of business-critical applications is assured even if network conditions change.
Fully implemented, the Path Selection project has created a more efficient, flexible and reliable network. Michel Boulay estimates large, recurrent cost savings and a ROI of 12 months: “With SteelHead and the Path Selection project, we have more bandwidth for less money. Previously, network costs could have made some new applications unacceptable. Today, we have bandwidth to spare, so I can accommodate new applications quickly and at a high quality.”
Riverbed SteelHead and the Riverbed Application Performance Platform
Riverbed is delivering solutions to help companies transition from legacy hardware to a new software-defined and cloud-centric approach to networking, and improve end user experience, allowing enterprises’ digital transformation initiatives to reach their full potential.
The Riverbed Application Performance Platform delivers the agility, visibility, and performance businesses need to be successful in a cloud and digital world.
By leveraging the Platform, organizations can deliver apps, data, and services from any public, private, or hybrid cloud across any network to any end-point.
