Riverbed helps leading manufacturing company Interplex successfully use robotics technology at its global sites

Riverbed, the Application Performance Company, today announced that Singapore-based Interplex, a leading global precision engineering and manufacturing company, has adopted Riverbed to modernize its infrastructure, improving application performance, network visibility and business agility.

Interplex's 40 manufacturing facilities span Europe, 12 countries in Asia Pacific and the United States, providing advanced application development and manufacturing solutions for complex precision machinery, electromechanical components and assemblies.

In the past few years, Interplex has made strategic investments in the IT field. The most important initiative is the introduction of robotics technology into the production workshop, thereby improving operational efficiency and production capacity, greatly improving the production efficiency of backward departments.

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Bandwidth demands are staggering, and lack of network visibility is holding businesses back

It is undeniable that automation technology has brought efficiency to enterprises; however, rapid innovation and the introduction of new applications, new services, and interconnected devices have increased data traffic, causing the network to be overwhelmed and reducing application performance, production efficiency, and cost efficiency. Over time, the speed of various applications sent through the network through the Singapore data center has slowed down significantly, which has frustrated users; this is especially true for factories located in rural areas that lack stable Internet services. The "turtle-speed" network makes it impossible to effectively deploy various new applications and services. In addition, these projects will increase the complexity of the network. Due to limited visibility into traffic patterns, application layer utilization, and device layer performance, infrastructure and application teams waste a lot of time on internal disputes while trying to discover and fix performance failures.

Ken Khoo, Interplex's management information systems manager who is responsible for the company's global infrastructure, said: "Manufacturing automation using robotics is a big deal, especially in terms of productivity and cost savings, but it also adds to the complexity of IT. All the robotic production lines are connected to the ERP system, which means that production and defect rates are clearly visible. It is really amazing that we can achieve this, but it also leads to many complaints about the network."

Apply visualization and optimization technology to achieve unexpected results

Interplex prioritized not increasing bandwidth and proposed a solution that could meet the complex needs of the enterprise for a period of time as a long-term goal. The company chose the Riverbed solution because it can provide customers with a modern network and application performance infrastructure with integrated end-to-end visibility technology. The solution can save customers costs, quickly meet compliance requirements, and pave the way for a smoother digital transformation. In addition, Riverbed has a skilled support team that can meet our global expansion.

The solution adopted by Interplex incorporates Riverbed SteelHead, the industry's leading WAN optimization solution, and Riverbed SteelCentral network and application performance management that can achieve end-to-end visibility. The Riverbed SteelHead solution is spread across 13 sites. Riverbed's professional services are deeply involved in every step of the execution process and provide support to users worldwide.

End-to-end visualization and faster applications lay a solid foundation for the future

Riverbed SteelHead was able to reduce bandwidth consumption by more than 50% in just two weeks, greatly simplifying management and improving return on investment. At the same time, employees noticed a huge improvement in the performance of inventory tracking applications, which can be completed by feeding data into the company's ERP system through a barcode scanner. SteelHead can reduce scanning time from 10 seconds to 3 seconds, increasing work efficiency by 70%. Khoo said: "After adopting this solution, the user experience is completely different from before. All applications are as fast as local operations."

Leveraging network telemetry and application performance data, SteelCentral provides Interplex with real-time device status, link-level monitoring, uptime information and alerts, and traffic pattern visualization to monitor application-layer usage and top network traffic generators. This is particularly beneficial for IT staff who have limited local IT support and manage from remote sites. "My team was able to quickly and accurately identify problems at the code level in some instances, and the immediate response was all thanks to SteelCentral," said Khoo. "In just a few minutes, SteelCentral identified an application performance issue that had persisted for a month in the United States. We assumed that the application was not performing well, after all, it was being sent through Singapore, so we kept trying to resolve network latency issues. It turned out that we had not carefully examined the performance of the application. In the past, the infrastructure and application teams would always blame each other when encountering problems, but with SteelCentral, this is no longer the case."

With a strong backbone of application and network performance infrastructure, Interplex has set its sights on expanding process automation for customers and suppliers, while also planning to move a significant portion of its applications and services to the cloud.

"Riverbed solutions enable us to push more applications to users faster, helping us realize the value of IT in the business," said Khoo. "We are now proud to be a technology-driven company. Savings are king. The savings we make on IT productivity can benefit our customers indirectly, and we can reinvest these savings into the business to help it achieve future growth, development and innovation."

SteelHead and SteelCentral, a perfect combination to achieve excellence

Riverbed solutions help enterprises transform from traditional hardware to new software-defined, cloud-centric networks, while improving end-user experience and fully realizing the potential of enterprise digital transformation initiatives. The Riverbed Application Performance Platform provides enterprises in the cloud era and digital world with the agility, visibility and performance they need to succeed. With this platform, enterprises can deliver all types of applications, data and services to any endpoint from any public cloud, private cloud or hybrid cloud in any network. When Riverbed SteelHead and SteelCentral are used together, a complete application visualization and optimization solution can be provided for hybrid enterprises, achieving real-time application, network and end-user experience visualization and deep application intelligence to ensure that critical applications achieve QoS that keeps all applications consistent with enterprise goals and application acceleration, ensuring that users at any location can improve end-user experience, increase productivity, optimize resources and reduce total cost of ownership.