FIT Builds Premium Service Based on WDS Solutions From Riverbed

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced that
Freudenberg IT (FIT), an international full-service IT service provider
with locations in Europe, the USA, and Asia, is offering a premium
service based on Riverbed’s Steelhead WDS products.

The new service
provided by FIT delivers to medium-sized businesses across the globe a
variety of benefits, including dramatic improvements in application
performance for their field offices—including remote sites and mobile
workers—improved collaboration between distributed employees, reduced
costs, and control over IT infrastructure. In addition, FIT is better
able to manage its customer SLAs, improve customer satisfaction, and
broaden its portfolio of service offerings.

The Freudenberg Group
is comprised of 14 business groups operating independently in various
markets all over the world with 33,000 employees in 54 countries and a
revenue base of 5 Billion Euros. FIT is a part of the Freudenberg Group
with about 400 employees and revenue of more than 50 Million Euros. FIT
provides IT services to medium-sized businesses, specializing in
automotive supply, discrete manufacturing, logistics providers, the
roll-based products and technical trades. As an international
full-service IT service provider, FIT also implements, optimizes, and
operates IT systems in SAP environments.

FIT’s most critical
IT requirement is enabling its client community to make full use of its
product offerings. Issues such as poor application performance over the
wide area network (WAN), complicated data management and bandwidth
congestion are all barriers that FIT faces as it works to deliver to
its customers business-enabling services. FIT turned to WDS vendors in
an effort to overcome these issues.

"We were looking for a
product that could overcome all the key factors that decelerate
application performance over the WAN: high latency, limited bandwidth,
‘busy’ transport protocols, and even ‘busier’ applications," said Mr.
Heiko Ruschen, infrastructure consultant with FIT. "Initially, we
tested Cisco, Ipanema, and F5. Careful research showed that for FIT’s
purpose, all of these alternatives had disadvantages compared to
Riverbed’s solution. We then tested Riverbed® extensively and found
that it integrated well in our environment and exceeded our
expectations in terms of both bandwidth efficiency and performance
improvements."

FIT also found Riverbed’s customer support and
ease-of-use and management of particular value when rolling out a
managed premium service.

"Aside from greatly improved
application performance, simplicity and ease-of-use were the key
reasons that FIT chose Riverbed," continued Ruschen. "The product was
incredibly simple to install. The central management console (CMC)
simplifies the process of deploying, configuring and managing Steelhead
appliances—all through one Web-based interface."

With the
roll-out of the new WDS service, FIT is able to offer to its customers
a complete solution that reduces WAN traffic, ensures high application
performance, enables successful site consolidation projects and ensures
effective data protection. In addition, Riverbed simplified FIT’s IT
administration and data management requirements, and FIT now finds it
easier to control and report SLAs. With centralized infrastructure, FIT
can offer even more services as a hosting provider. This is the key to
FIT’s strategy.

Freudenberg Group

Riverbed Technology