Polish Amica Wronki Selects Riverbed

Riverbed Technology announced that Amica Wronki S.A. has selected and deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobile. As a result, Amica has successfully migrated key applications and data backups to its data centers, improved employee collaboration and productivity, avoided a costly bandwidth upgrade, and reduced operating costs.

Amica Wronki S.A. is a manufacturer of a wide range of household appliances, including refrigerators and washing machines. With over one million products produced each year, Amica has become one of the most recognized brands in Poland. The company employs over 2,000 people in 13 offices around the world, selling its products in over 40 countries. Amica relies upon local ERP systems, SAP, Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint to enable employee collaboration across its operations.

Amica wanted its users to migrate from an ERP system based at each branch office to a centrally hosted SAP application. However, accessing files and data over the wide area network (WAN) took too long, causing employee frustration. To overcome the issue of slow application access, the company initially believed that it had to either upgrade bandwidth or install additional servers. Amica wanted to avoid both of these options due to the costs and complexity involved.

Amica also planned to centralize its data backups and reduce the current backup window. Amica’s IT company, Inteco Business Solutions Sp. z o.o., which supports the Amica group, is based at Amica’s headquarters in Poland, with no IT resource available at branch offices. The company was relying upon branch office employees to back up data, which involved onerous procedures and complicated instructions, and which resulted in data backups taking over eight hours per day.

Faced with both challenges, Amica chose to investigate a WAN optimization solution. After testing products from a number of vendors, the company chose Riverbed. Jerzy Zielinski, director of the information technology department at Inteco Business Solutions, explains: "We found the Riverbed solution to be the most efficient and, by far, the best performer for optimizing applications over the WAN. It was also very straightforward to implement."

Since installing Steelhead appliances at three data centers in Poland and three branch offices, as well as deploying Steelhead Mobile for remote workers, Amica has experienced a 4x improvement in the time taken to download files, enabling the company to remove the local ERP systems at those branch office locations. The time taken to back up data was reduced by 98%, with backups reduced from over eight hours to just minutes – and the company has removed two local servers and two data storage devices from the branch offices.

There have also been other benefits. "We use SharePoint for file collaboration," explains Zielinski. "Without Riverbed Steelhead appliances, accessing SharePoint files over the intranet takes a very long time and is extremely frustrating. In contrast, the employees in our offices with Riverbed deployed can now access business-critical applications in just a few seconds."

Remote users now have LAN-like access to files and applications, and the company has seen an increase in user productivity. The Riverbed solution has also enabled Amica to move key business applications and data backups to its centralized IT infrastructure, resulting in improved security of critical data. The company has also reduced operating costs by removing servers and data storage devices from its branch offices.

"Riverbed has allowed us to be more nimble in our approach to IT and infrastructure," says Zielinski. "When organizations like ours can do more with their existing network, we immediately have an advantage – because, in addition to increasing productivity, our costs are reduced, which allows us to invest back into the business to support growth and new opportunities."