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Riverbed Solutions Improve Performance of Business-Critical Apps and IT Infrastructure Planning at SAS
[July 29, 2015]

Riverbed Solutions Improve Performance of Business-Critical Apps and IT Infrastructure Planning at SAS


Riverbed Technology, the leader in application performance infrastructure, today announced that SAS (News - Alert), a leader in analytics solutions, is able to more quickly troubleshoot application performance problems, streamline web application design, and improve IT infrastructure planning using Riverbed® SteelCentral™ application performance management (APM (News - Alert)) solutions. SteelCentral AppResponse and SteelCentral Transaction Analyzer provide in-depth visibility into the many factors influencing application performance in hybrid IT environments, which allows SAS to ensure that its business-critical applications perform well regardless of how they are accessed (WAN or Internet) and where they are hosted (company's data center or public cloud).

SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Its IT team supports equipment in more than 100 locations around the world. Many of the company's business-critical applications, including CRM, VoIP, and training systems, have been centralized and are delivered to the offices via the Internet (as web-based applications) and over the company's WAN. Increasingly, SAS employees are accessing cloud-based SaaS (News - Alert) applications, as well.

"As SAS has grown we have globalized our IT operations. While that means greater complexity, it also opens the opportunity to centralize and streamline application performance management. In the past, when application problems occurred, the IT team would try to recreate the issue and observe what was happening in real time," said Doug Bradley, senior information systems engineer at SAS. "We wanted a solution that would speed results and support more efficient use of our resources."

SAS chose Riverbed (News - Alert) SteelCentral solutions after trying two other application performance monitoring options. The company installed two AppResponse appliances in its North Carolina data center. One monitors the company's three Internet carriers as well as the site-to-site VPNs SAS uses to connect with its major customers. The second appliance monitors the company's WAN. For additional functionality, SAS uses Transaction Analyzer transaction trace analysis and performance prediction software.

"With Riverbed SteelCentral, issues that might have taken weeks previously take only days now. With the data stored in the appliances, we can just dial back in time. It's like a time machine," explained Bradley. "We appreciate the ability to see key performance indicators at a glance. The last thing I want to do is look at a packet trace. With AppResponse I don't have to do that because it provides about 60 performance metrics."

In addition to troubleshooting, SAS uses AppResponse to help developers improve web-based applications. AppResponse web transaction analysis allows them to break down the various constiuents of a web page. "Developers use that information to look at how long some of the scripts take, which lets them focus on where to get the biggest bang for their development time," added Bradley.



SAS also uses SteelCentral - specifically Transaction Analyzer's ability to perform "what-if" comparisons - for IT infrastructure planning. Bradley can feed in a packet trace and then use knobs and sliders to look at things like whether adding bandwidth at a certain location will improve application performance.

Bradley is making the information from SteelCentral more widely available to other groups in the organization with the easy-to-understand dashboards. For example, SAS hosts a number of applications and offers them as SaaS. Bradley has set up dashboards for some of those hosting projects. The people who work on them are not necessarily network engineers but using the dashboards lets them monitor application performance without going into it too deeply.


Riverbed® SteelCentral™

SteelCentral is the only performance management and control suite that combines user experience, and application and network performance management to provide the visibility needed to diagnose and cure issues before end users notice a problem, call the help desk to complain, or jump to another website out of frustration. Delivering visibility, analytics, and insight, SteelCentral empowers companies to leverage IT to innovate and differentiate from the competition, and drastically reduce the time and effort required to develop, deploy, and ensure application performance. SteelCentral solutions are leveraged throughout today's rapid application life cycles and across IT operations and development teams, providing a centralized and common solution to maximize efficiency, performance, and productivity in today's application-driven hybrid world. SteelCentral is part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform, the most complete platform that gives CIOs unparalleled visibility to deliver, control, and optimize all IT resources across the hybrid enterprise.

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About Riverbed

Riverbed, at more than $1 billion in annual revenue, is the leader in Application Performance Infrastructure, delivering the most complete platform for the hybrid enterprise to ensure applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed, and performance issues can be proactively detected and resolved before impacting business performance. Riverbed enables hybrid enterprises to transform application performance into a competitive advantage by maximizing employee productivity and leveraging IT to create new forms of operational agility. Riverbed's 25,000+ customers include 97% of both the Fortune 100 and the Forbes Global 100. Learn more at www.riverbed.com.

Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logo used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners.


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