Del Monte opt RiverBed All-Cloud IT Strategy to Revamp Business Environments
Riverbed Technology announces that Del Monte Foods is using Riverbed SteelHead and SteelHead SaaS to power its new all-cloud IT environment.
Del Monte deploys SteelHead and SteelHead SaaS to optimize performance, visibility and control of their enterprise and cloud-based applications, such as Microsoft Office 365. According to Del Monte Foods, the all-cloud environment, optimized by Riverbed, delivers improved application performance and is 50% the cost of the previous on-premises environment.
Timothy Weaver, Del Monte Foods’ VP/CIO used a corporate reorganization as an opportunity to take the company’s IT organization in a new direction. “It was important to have a lean and agile IT organization that was more about innovation and change than just ongoing maintenance and support of the existing environment,” Weaver cites, His strategy was to go all-cloud, with an HP VPC for hosting enterprise applications such as SAP, along with Software-as-a-Service for other business-critical applications such as file sharing (Box), video conferencing (Blue Jeans), and email and other office software (Office 365).
Weaver knew this approach would work only if there were reliable network connections to Del Monte’s 30 facilities across the U.S. and Mexico. Another factor was application performance over the network. It needed to be as good or better than users had experienced with the previous IT environment or they would reject the new cloud-based solutions, which had already happened. “Initially, performance was poor at some of the bandwidth-constrained sites and we saw a slower uptake of some of the newer solutions we wanted to deploy,” Weaver noted.
“We have run Office 365 with and without SteelHead SaaS, and with it, users saw things get faster,” Weaver said. “At one of our large distribution facilities, people weren’t actively using some of the tools because of network performance issues. Since deploying SteelHead SaaS, we’ve seen the adoption rate of those tools go up as application performance increases.”
With SteelHead Path Selection, application-centric policies will make it simple for Weaver to direct applications over the most optimal paths and ensure that business needs and priorities are met. With streamlined configuration and policy management, SteelHead can efficiently leverage the entire hybrid infrastructure for better ROI.
The Riverbed Application Performance Platform gives CIOs end-to-end visibility, optimization and control across an entire enterprise. A key part of the platform, Riverbed SteelHead is a prime optimization solution for accelerated delivery of all applications across the hybrid enterprise. SteelHead provides increased visibility into application performance and end-user experience and the ability to ensure business performance SLAs through an application-aware approach to hybrid networking based on centralized business intent-based policies.