Case Study: Liz Claiborne Inc. achieves 20-40x faster application performance and 80% bandwidth savings with Riverbed Steelhead appliances

Riverbed Steelhead Appliances Deployed by a Global Retailer to Improve Employee Productivity, Centralize Applications, and Ease WAN-based Backup

Liz Claiborne, a global apparel retailer with more than 40 brands and 30,000 points of sale, needed to keep a distributed sales, finance and operations workforce productive while expanding internationally. Growing latency and limited WAN bandwidth meant employees experienced long waits for large files and sluggish access to centralized ERP, Exchange, SharePoint and backup systems, making a move to centrally deployed applications impractical without improving WAN performance.

The company deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances (37 units across North America and Asia, with 60+ more planned) to accelerate applications and optimize WAN traffic. Results included 20x–40x faster application performance, WAN backup windows reduced from 16 to 6 hours, bandwidth use cut by over 80% (equivalent to an 8x capacity increase on some links), much faster file downloads and smoother rollout of centralized applications—leading to measurably higher employee productivity.

Liz Claiborne Inc.

Gary Williams

Director of End User Computing