Korn/Ferry International Deploys Riverbed

Riverbed Technology announced the deployment of Riverbed Steelhead appliances at all seventeen of Korn/Ferry International’s Asia-Pacific offices.

The Steelhead appliances have accelerated Korn/Ferry International‘s key business applications by more than 6X, while drastically reducing its wide area network (WAN) traffic volume. As a result, employee productivity and satisfaction with resource accessibility have increased, and Korn/Ferry International’s employees are now able to collaborate across regions without delay. In addition, deployment of the Riverbed solution allowed Korn/Ferry International to avoid a network upgrade, thus saving the organization substantial costs.

Korn/Ferry International is a premier global provider of executive recruitment services. The firm delivers an array of solutions that help clients to identify, deploy, develop, retain and reward their talent. Korn/Ferry International has 90 offices in 40 countries around the world and has a workforce of over 2,000 employees.

"Korn/Ferry International employees need to collaborate globally, as well as to share information on our clients’ needs and our available talent pool," said Stein Bang, senior director of IT for Asia-Pacific at Korn/Ferry International. "Several of our key IT applications are hosted in our Los Angeles data center. We need a solution that delivers to our employees in Asia LAN-like performance for these and other distributed IT applications. At the same time, though, we must be cost-effective in our IT investments. Meeting both priorities can be quite a challenge."

Starting in late 2007, Korn/Ferry International began the rollout of a new MPLS network to interconnect all of its Asia-Pacific offices. "During 2007, we made the decision to upgrade our regional WAN. Since we were also planning to consolidate our distributed email servers, we knew that we needed WAN optimization technology as a critical part of this solution," said Mr. Bang. "We evaluated products from five vendors before selecting our WAN optimization solution. After a rigorous evaluation, we selected Riverbed, whose offerings were clearly the best due to their ease-of-installation, superior performance and reasonable cost," continued Mr. Bang. "Verizon was selected due to its excellent global and regional presence – and its ability to supply the Riverbed Steelhead WAN optimization products together with its MPLS network service."

"Before we installed the Riverbed Steelhead appliances, it would have taken the Singapore office approximately two minutes to download a 20 MB file from another branch office like Hong Kong, but it now takes less than 20 seconds," added Mr. Bang. "The Riverbed solution is an excellent complement to Verizon’s MPLS service. Many users have commented positively about the time they’re able to save each day since we installed these products."

"We have been successful in upgrading our WAN service and, more important, the critical business applications that run on top of it," said Mr. Bang. "With the increased application performance, we have been able to consolidate 14 email servers down to 4, and we are looking to do the same with our SQL servers in the near future. This has saved us a lot of money – and actually improved application performance to the end users. It’s quite a remarkable result."

The business benefits of the Riverbed solution have been so significant that Korn/Ferry International has expanded the deployment to include seven key locations in Europe and the United States, including the company’s global headquarters in Los Angeles.