Aki Portugal Improves SharePoint Performance With Riverbed

Riverbed Technology announced that AKI Portugal, a DIY (do-it-yourself) retailer, has installed 27 Riverbed Steelhead appliances in its data center, warehouse and retail outlets across Portugal. With Riverbed deployed, AKI employees can now process orders in a matter of seconds rather than minutes, resulting in improved business and employee productivity. In addition, AKI Portugal was able to avoid an expensive bandwidth upgrade, resulting in savings of approximately EUR 58,000 ($79,000) per year.

AKI Portugal is part of the French group Adeo, which operates 60 retail outlets across Spain and Portugal. AKI Portugal was the first major DIY retailer in Portugal, with 25 stores across 27 Riverbed Steelhead appliances in the country, and now supplies over 25,000 products for home and garden improvements.

AKI Portugal relies upon Microsoft SharePoint for file sharing and order processing, with employees accessing documents via the company intranet. Retail staff in the stores was struggling to process orders in a timely fashion due to the delays encountered when accessing the intranet, and then waiting for documents to download. Large numbers of orders are transferred between the stores and head office every day, and these delays were seriously impacting both employee and business performance. To make matters worse, employees resorted to sending orders over email. This workaround not only increased the amount of data traversing the WAN, but also introduced the possibility of mistakes occurring when orders were not processed correctly.

"We needed to improve application performance over the WAN and considered upgrading our bandwidth link from 2Mbps to 4Mpbs," explains Rúben Salgueiro, IT director at AKI Portugal, who knew that upgrading bandwidth would not have completely resolved the issue due to file latency associated with Windows file sharing applications. "This would have increased our costs by almost EUR 58,000 per year, which was unacceptable to us. As a retail outlet working on tight margins, any increase in cost that delivers minimal benefits is not an option."

Salgueiro decided to evaluate WAN optimization offerings from Riverbed and Cisco by running a small pilot between the company headquarters and two stores. "We needed a solution that would be quick and easy to install because we wanted minimal disruption to the company’s operations," says Salgueiro. "The Riverbed solution was just impressive. Not only was it easier to install, but it provided the IT team with access to bandwidth utilization and data reduction statistics. A clear winner all around."

With the Steelhead appliances installed, the company has reduced bandwidth utilization by more than 50 percent. Employees can now access and process orders via SharePoint in seconds rather than minutes, resulting in secure order procedures and improved business productivity. Salgueiro’s team has also seen an immediate benefit. As he explains: "Before using Riverbed, the retail staff constantly complained about the time taken to process orders. Now those complaints are rare and my team can concentrate on other projects. Overall the business has benefited in a number of ways, thanks to Riverbed."