Global Application Performance is within Reach: A Tale of Three Successful Enterprises

Today’s corporate networks look like a bowl of spaghetti. They’re made up of headquarters, branch offices, private datacenters, cloud platforms, SaaS apps, centrally hosted applications, multiple MPLS providers, and appliances. These constructs are complicated to say the least.

Clearly a platform is needed to pull together, accelerate, and manage all these moving parts — no matter where they are located — as one simple network.

So when I introduce Aryaka’s global SD-WAN to my customers, they are intrigued. Our conversation goes like this:

Them: You can accelerate applications sitting in the cloud or SaaS?
Me: Yes

Them: And optimize applications hosted in our datacenters?
Me: Yes

Them: Wait, and I need nothing but the Internet on the last mile, not even an optimization controller?
Me: Yes!

Thinking Beyond Application Acceleration

This is a revelation for a lot of IT teams, especially ones that have become used to relying on brick and mortar approaches with CapEx heavy WAN Optimization Appliances. Many believe that accelerated application performance must involve deploying symmetric WAN Optimization Controllers (WOCs), an idea propagated by traditional WAN Op Box vendors.

Aryaka, on the other hand, addresses the root cause of the application performance problem an additional angle — the network — rather than trying to solve it from device-dependent, optimization rules and proxies.

While Aryaka does the usual suspects of acceleration proxies (CIFS, FTP, HTTP/HTTPS, MAPI, etc.), our larger application agnostic approach means we don’t need many as many of them. Our byte-level data deduplication and compression technology, embedded within our global private network, supports all non-encrypted traffic, independent of application-specific data formatting. And with a secure vault upload of an SSL Cert, we’ve got your O365 covered as well.  Yes, all of these benefits extend to applications hosted in cloud and SaaS environments as well.

This enables us to support literally any application origin when it comes to accelerating performance, whether they’re SaaS, hosted apps, web apps, real-time apps, or anything else.  And we can deliver these results to any type of client user accessing them.

Take a look at some of the benefits three global enterprises experienced with Aryaka:

1) Skullcandy Tackles SaaS-based ERP Performance Issues

There is a massive-scale migration of mission-critical applications to public cloud datacenters, and like most other organizations, Skullcandy was looking to seize the advantages of cloud and SaaS-based applications.

The leading audio accessory manufacturer was using SAP Business ByDesign to streamline their operations. Unfortunately, the speed of the SaaS-based ERP application was doing anything but. Business processes, such as order management and delivery, were impacted, which led to decreased productivity.

Why so slow? The application was accessed over the Internet, which is plagued with unreliable latency and congestion-based packet loss. Skullcandy had to figure out a way to enhance the connectivity between their global sites and SAP’s remote server.

Skullcandy chose Aryaka’s global SD-WAN to connect their global offices with SAP’s servers. The company immediately witnessed significant improvements in the performance of the application at their branch offices in the United States, Canada, Germany, China, and Japan.  And they were able to terminate their incumbent MPLS agreement as well.

With Aryaka, SkullCandy’s SAP Business ByDesign performance increased 10x.

Also, the company saw up to 93% data reduction across all applications, due to Aryaka’s compression and patented data deduplication technologies, resulting in up to 40 Mbps peak bandwidth savings.

“File transfers are much faster, our PLM application is reliable, and our cloud-based SAP Business ByDesign ERP performance has increased significantly. Aryaka is helping us uphold our brand by giving us the solution we need to not only respond to customer demand, but to also improve business productivity.”

 – Yohan Beghein, Senior Network Engineer at Skullcandy

2) Xactly Accelerates RDP To Improve Real-Time Collaboration

Real-time applications like Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) applications (Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop, VMware View, etc.) provide remote display and input capabilities over network connections to enable collaboration between geographically dispersed users. However, these applications are susceptible to the high latencies that arise when accessed over long-distance MPLS links.

Xactly, a leading SaaS based provider of Connection Lifecycle Management (CLM) software, was experiencing similar issues with RDP performance between their offices in Bangalore, India and San Jose, California.

Upon deploying Aryaka’s global SD-WAN and leveraging our enterprise-grade global private network, Xactly experienced a 6x improvement in RDP performance.

“We had been using MPLS links to connect our international offices, but application performance remained poor, and latency was a killer. We switched to Aryaka because we place a high value on the consistency and affordability they deliver with their global, private WAN.”

– Robert Genchi, Director of Information Systems/Technology, Xactly

3) Office 365 Runs Faster Globally for Invensense

InvenSense, the leading provider of intelligent Sensor System on Chip solutions, was looking to improve collaboration among its globally-distributed workforce. There were multiple complaints from employees regarding poor application performance, especially for Office 365.

InvenSense had been considering conventional solutions like MPLS but realized that these legacy solutions were not designed to cater to the cloud environment. Moreover, these solutions were too expensive, took months to deploy, and they also needed to be bookended with WAN Optimization hardware that would not address the O365 at the application origin. Additionally, managing and maintaining this complex infra-structure was anything but attractive to the InvenSense team.

To eliminate performance issues with Office 365 and deliver a seamless user experience to end users, InvenSense deployed Aryaka’s SmartConnect. Not only was deployment worldwide within a matter of days, but application performance for Office 365 improved up to 17x, and they also saw up to 12 Mbps bandwidth savings.

“Our employees used to frequently complain about the slowness of Office 365, which was running over the Internet. We needed a high-performance, cloud-ready wide area network that could make our lives easier. With Aryaka’s Office 365 acceleration solution, our employees experienced terrific performance improvements all over the world. I think the ability of Aryaka’s solution to connect to cloud providers like Microsoft is phenomenal and truly helps businesses like us to leverage the benefits of SaaS.”

– Kenny Gilbert, CIO at InvenSense

Aryaka: The Swiss Army Knife of Global Connectivity

Where corporate networks used to be simple connections between headquarters and branches, today there are too many types of connections to count, due to the demands of serving a myriad of application origins and end users. Businesses want to fully embrace the cost efficiency of remote hosting without all the risk of slow, shaky, or insecure network connections, while still strengthening the security, stability, and performance of hosted applications—all to cater to end users with constantly growing performance expectations.

Aryaka’s Managed SD-WAN solution offers fast, private connectivity from customer premises to private datacenters as well as to SaaS providers. And the same global network platform can be used to accelerate the performance of real-time and web applications. This is nothing short of revolutionary for an enterprise’s IT organization.

Today, MPLS solutions are being outpaced by the needs of a cloud- and SaaS-hungry market. When all applications resided on one network, MPLS made some sense — if you were willing to ignore the high bandwidth costs and lengthy deployment schedules of around 60 to 120 days. Today, solutions that can accelerate applications hosted in every remote server on the network make much more sense.

To evaluate how Aryaka can help improve the performance of your applications, sign up for a free trial today!

About the author

David Nuti

David Nuti is the Vice President of Business Development (Americas) at Aryaka. He has over 20 years of experience driving market adoption of next-generation software and technology solutions. Prior to joining Aryaka, Dave has held senior sales and leadership roles with some of the leading cloud and SaaS, SDN, and ERP providers in the industry.