Technology outsourcing company WNS Holdings is using Riverbed SteelHead to increase application speed over the network by 3x, accelerating email and file downloads by 10x.
Riverbed Technology said WNS’s IT team has achieved a drop in the number of IT help tickets related to slow performance after deploying SteelHead. The investment in the SteelHead also eliminated the need for bandwidth upgrades in future. The investment in SteelHead will pay for itself in seven to 12 months, considering the benefits.
“As a result, business efficiency and productivity were impacted, end-user complaints skyrocketed, and bandwidth upgrade needs spiked,” said Amit Khanna, head – Business Technology at WNS Global Services.
Riverbed, which has more than $1 billion in annual revenue, has over 28,000 customers including 97 percent of the Fortune 100 and 98 percent of the Forbes Global 100.
‪WNS, which serves 200+ clients, has more than 30,000 employees serve across 45 delivery centers located in China, Costa Rica, India, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, South Africa, Sri Lanka, UK and US.
WNS Global Services’ Mumbai-based IT team had two options: undertake bandwidth upgrades across the company’s network or to implement a WAN optimization solution to reduce network traffic and accelerate application performance.
Realizing that bandwidth in certain locations would be cost-prohibitive, and adding bandwidth would do nothing to address latency, WNS opted for WAN optimization.
WNS installed SteelHead appliances in 45 offices in India and overseas, as well as in the Mumbai data center.
“The results of the deployment were immediate and significant, indicating that there was no need to increase bandwidth,” Amit Khanna said.
SteelHead optimization assisted WNS to transfer file 10x faster than in the past. Emails are up to 10x faster and intranet and other business-critical applications run up to three times faster. End users commented on the remarkable difference after noticing improvement in the speed and application performance.
Riverbed SteelHead reduced Microsoft Exchange traffic – which accounts for more than two-thirds of overall traffic across the organization – by 83 percent. HTTP traffic, which accounts for 17 percent of the traffic, has seen a 96 percent reduction.
WNS has realized up to 30 percent bandwidth reduction in addition to significant performance improvement, which provides a direct cost savings for the company, eliminating the need to purchase more bandwidth.