Midea Group Selects Riverbed

Riverbed Technology announced that the Midea Group, manufacturer of household appliances in China, has deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances in its headquarters and production bases nationwide to improve the performance of key business applications for its China workforce, while reducing overall bandwidth usage. The deployment of the Riverbed solution has enabled the Midea Group to reduce its wide area network (WAN) traffic volume by up to 60 percent and accelerate applications by 6.3 times, which has improved collaboration between remote sites. With the Riverbed WAN optimization solution in place, the Midea Group is able to consider decreasing WAN bandwidth to lower IT costs.

Founded in 1968, the Midea Group is a renowned conglomerate in China specializing in the manufacturing of household appliances, with other divisions in real estate and logistics. The company has more than 100,000 workers across China and is considered one of the largest appliance and white goods producers and exporters in the country today. The company possesses an extensive marketing network spread throughout China, and has established nearly thirty overseas branch subsidiaries around the world, including in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, Canada, Russia, France, Malaysia and Vietnam.

The Midea Group’s centralized IT infrastructure, which runs business-critical applications such as ERP, CRM, HR and marketing, has been important in allowing the Midea Group to expand. However, geographically dispersed users were finding it increasingly difficult to access applications in a timely manner. Poor application performance continued to plague some branch offices even after WAN upgrades.

To overcome latency and bandwidth challenges, the Midea Group decided to investigate a WAN optimization solution. After proof-of-concept tests with Riverbed and Juniper, the Midea Group ultimately selected Riverbed Steelhead appliances. The Riverbed solution delivered superior performance and was easy to deploy, manage and maintain. It showed great advantages over the competition in real-world testing.

Within a month of deploying the Steelhead appliances at its headquarters and production bases in China, the Midea Group’s traffic volume over the WAN was cut by up to 60 percent and the overall application speed increased by 6.3 times. In some of the production bases, application performance was accelerated dozens of times, which enabled LAN-like performance. By providing LAN-like performance and accelerating the transfer of files over the WAN, collaboration between employees at different locations has improved.

The Riverbed deployment has allowed the Midea Group to evaluate its bandwidth expenditures and look into reducing WAN bandwidth at some of the branch offices to lower the cost of IT operations.