Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 81 | Page 57

CASE STUDY suited to advise on which solutions would work best with Office 365 and ELARABY ’ s existing Microsoft Exchange server .
“ We needed to provide ELARABY with a solution that would ensure it had the connectivity and secure performance it needed to maintain its reputation as a reliable and trusted retailer ,” said Ahmed El Missiry , Global Brands ’ Digital Transformation Advisor . “ It quickly became clear that Riverbed was the right choice for these needs .” Microsoft and Riverbed ’ s long-standing global partnership has also helped ELARABY due to the strong level of collaboration between the local sales and technical teams .
“ With its workforce spread across a vast geography and its focus on a cloud-first IT strategy , ELARABY has benefitted greatly from the joint value proposition of Microsoft Office 365 and the Riverbed acceleration solutions ,” said Mirna Arif , Country General Manager , Microsoft Egypt . “ This has ultimately translated to a robust solution that enables ELARABY to offer its employees a consistent and impressive user experience across their collaboration and productivity applications .”
ELARABY has recently extended Riverbed SteelHead with the addition of six new appliances and one software instance in Azure . In addition , the company has deployed 3,500 licenses of Riverbed SaaS Accelerator , as well as Riverbed Cloud Accelerator .
“ We wanted a solution that could compress data before sending it between sites . We could see immediately how Riverbed ’ s technology could address latency ,” said ElAraby .
SteelHead is the industry ’ s number one optimisation solution for accelerated delivery of any application across the hybrid WAN . Leveraging SteelHead ’ s unmatched data , transport and application streamlining technologies , ELARABY can significantly improve control and business agility .
Riverbed ’ s SaaS Accelerator solution spins up in the cloud and works with any SteelHead appliance or software-based Client Accelerator agent . It enables ELARABY to determine which applications to accelerate based on business priorities and to get started with a single click .
Connecting a regional workforce
In total , 6,000 users at ELARABY now have access to Office 365 and the improved performance across email , Dynamics 365 for Customer Service and Field Service , and SAP , and its had a direct and very positive impact on retail and production .
Executive Summary Challenge
• Reduce bandwidth to support move to SaaS applications
• Improve performance of Office 365 for 6,000 employees
Solution
• Riverbed SaaS Accelerator to accelerate Office 365
• Riverbed Cloud Accelerator to speed migration and access to workloads on Microsoft Azure
• Riverbed SteelHead to optimise and accelerate traffic and increase productivity
Benefits
• Underpins a connected , data-led regional business
• Delivers a faster , more responsive user experience on Office 365
• Optimises data transfer by 60 %, on average , 900GB less data per day
• Enables a 50 % increase in data transfer between sites with no increase in cost
The effect has been transformative . ELARABY has reduced data transmission between sites by 60 %, which on average , results in 900GB less data per day . The group is now far more efficient in the way data is consumed . This is delivering cost savings and improving connectivity and collaboration between sites and teams . Data is also better managed .
ElAraby added that : “ The encryption of data is very important to us because all the data transferred in the organisation has value – whether its sales figures , product designs or customer insights . Securing our data helps us maintain our competitive advantage .”
There is also the impact on users . With quick speeds and responsive features , ELARABY is getting full value out of its Office 365 investment . Microsoft Teams , Microsoft Stream and file sharing are now common workplace tools .
“ Riverbed optimises and compresses the SaaS data perfectly . We see it accelerating the data between Office 365 and the end-user ,” said ElAraby . p
www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO MIDDLE EAST 57