Riverbed optimises recruitment for Korn/Ferry

After two years, global recruitment firm Korn/Ferry has finished deploying Riverbed WAN optimisation across APAC, including its offices in Australia and New Zealand.

The deal was managed out of Singapore so no local resellers were involved however, Verizon was Riverbed's partner in Singapore.

Under the original agreement, Riverbed Steelhead was deployed at all 17 of Korn/Ferry International's Asia-Pacific offices.

Deployment of the Riverbed solution meant the company avoided a network upgrade.

Korn/Ferry International helps clients to identify, deploy, develop, retain and reward their talent.

The firm has 90 offices in 40 countries around the world and over 2,000 employees. 

Stein Bang, senior director of IT for APAC at Korn/Ferry International said its employees needed to collaborate globally, as well as to share information on clients' needs and available talent pool.

"Several of our key IT applications are hosted in our Los Angeles data centre," he said.

"We needed a solution that delivers to our employees in Asia LAN-like performance for these and other distributed IT applications."

Starting in late 2007, the firm began to rollout a MPLS network to interconnect all of its APAC offices.

"During 2007, we made the decision to upgrade our regional WAN," said Bang.

Since we were also planning to consolidate our distributed email servers, we knew that we needed WAN optimisation technology as a critical part of this solution.

"Verizon was selected due to its excellent global and regional presence - and its ability to supply the Riverbed Steelhead WAN optimisation products together with its MPLS network service."

Bang said the upgrade has allowed the company to consolidate 14 email servers down to four, and it is looking to do the same with its SQL servers in the near future.