Survey Says: Manufacturing Enterprises Are Globally Connected and Multi-Cloud Ready with Aryaka

Our manufacturing customers are a diverse bunch. From automatic test equipment, automotive  speakers and smart sensors to consumer-facing beauty products and sustainable packing solutions for the transportation of produce, our customers range across every vertical with headquarters, sites, manufacturing plants and a growing number of remote workers all over the world.

When we recently surveyed our customers in the manufacturing space to learn more about their networking and security challenges and priorities, we found a few common threads among the responses, despite the many differences in product offerings and geographies.

Global applications must perform at a high-level to support product development everywhere in the world.  

When asked which use cases Aryaka helps solves, the top two responses were application performance (71%) and improve connectivity to China (51%). Though we received the same top two responses in our previous survey to our entire customer database, the response percentage from our manufacturing customers was much higher. There are two reasons for this: manufacturing companies often need to collaborate on design applications, like CAD/CAM software, and a higher percentage of manufacturing companies compared to other industries, have a presence in China, whether it is offices, remote workers or manufacturing plants.

In one example, Teradyne, a global electronic test and industrial automation company that specializes in semiconductor test equipment and collaborative robotics, is headquartered in the U.S. with a globally dispersed product development team spread across Asia, Europe and North America. The team frequently collaborates in interactive sessions on graphic intense tools. Prior to deploying Aryaka’s managed SD-WAN solution, Teradyne was supporting eight different engineering design centers which was tedious and costly, and still application performance for remote engineers, particularly those in remote places around the world, was suffering. As a result, Teradyne estimates that remote engineers were up to 50% less efficient before deploying Aryaka. Additionally, they saw application performance in China improve by up to 15X.

Application speed is critical, but reliability is even more important.

We hear this time and again from our customers. They need to accelerate applications, but providing stability is even more critical.

In one example, Jumio, which provides identity verification through AI solutions and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, was not experiencing reliable network performance with their MPLS provider. Now, “Aryaka provides us the stability we need to work on customized applications… it also provides us with the best route/path and less latency.” This stability has led to

Similarly, Henny Penny, a U.S.-based manufacturer of commercial grade food equipment, noted the importance of a stable connection to China:

Manufacturing enterprises need a network that can support multi-cloud connectivity in order to enable digital transformation initiatives, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) projects, big data projects and more.

Pulse Electronics, for example, is a global leader in the design and manufacturing of electronic components headquartered in the U.S. They first selected Aryaka SmartServices to solve their connectivity to China issues and ready their network for digital transformation initiatives and an upcoming IIoT project because their MPLS network with WAN optimization hardware wasn’t providing the performance and reliability they needed. After deploying Aryaka SmartServices, they were not only able to accelerate key applications (Salesforce, Microsoft Office365, AutoCAD and SOLIDWORKS to name a few), but they were able to provide stable connectivity for their end-users in China, increasing productivity, and launching their IIoT initiatives.

Operational simplicity is king.

An increase in multi-cloud environments also means an increase in complexity. Couple that with all of our manufacturing customers being in globally dispersed companies juggling multiple ISP providers in various time zones, and customers are searching for ways to simplify their network and save time. For our customers, our managed services provide that operational simplicity they need.

Looking back at our Teradyne example – the IT team was support eight different engineering design centers, each with their own local infrastructure, to support the product development team. It was costly, complicated and time-consuming to support these remotely. With Aryaka, they were able to centralize their global design centers. Jumio was also able to simplify their network with Aryaka. After deploying Aryaka SmartServices, they estimate their team saves about 10-25% of time that was previously spent on incident resolution.

No matter the product or geography, our manufacturing customers trust Aryaka to provide the agility, reliability and operational simplicity they need to support their business now and into the future.

Editor’s Note: Though all surveyed respondents are verified customers, only some quotes are named as the respondents had the option to provide anonymous feedback.