Case Study: ABB achieves peak performance of critical, $1M/day applications and slashes troubleshooting time with Riverbed SteelCentral

Riverbed Visibility Ensures Peak Performance of Core Apps Whose Outage Costs $1 Million/Day

ABB, a global leader in power and automation with 150,000 employees, faced a critical visibility problem across its North American operations (30,000 users) where a single network manager, Michael Kerkau, was blamed for application slowdowns. Legacy homegrown applications—most notably Nextra CCP—had not scaled and outages could cost the business up to $1,000,000 per day; proving the network wasn’t at fault consumed 25–40% of Kerkau’s time, and Cisco WAAS appliances further obscured end‑user experience.

Kerkau adopted Riverbed SteelCentral Web Analyzer and engages Riverbed Professional Services using SteelCentral AppInternals, AppResponse and Transaction Analyzer to gain end‑to‑end, actionable visibility. The tools let him quickly attribute delays to front‑end or server issues instead of the network, eliminate finger‑pointing, and involve the right teams; troubleshooting time dropped from about 10–16 hours/week to ~1 hour/week (roughly 40–64 hours/month regained), long‑standing problems were resolved faster, and application owners now use the analyzer proactively.

ABB

Michael Kerkau

Network Infrastructure and Operations Manager