LG Electronics was established in the 1950s as the pioneer in the Korean consumer electronics market. The company is now a global force in electronics, information and communications products with 2004 annual sales of US $38 billion. LG Electronics is comprised of four main businesses: Mobile, Digital Appliance, Display and Media.

With more than 100 offices outside its headquarters, LG Electronics has a good investment in bandwidth and infrastructure, including expensive international connectivity that is marked by higher latency than intra-Korea bandwidth.

Prior to the installation of Riverbed's Steelhead appliances, the LG Electronics network was being stretched to capacity. The company was experiencing increased usage across all locations and all applications and a significant increase in the number of internal applications requiring network access, including many custom applications, says an official release.

In addition, several internal applications could not be accessed by employees in remote offices because application performance was so slow. For example, the LG Electronics purchase/sales/inventory application could not be accessed from the Vladivostok office.

LG Electronics needed a solution that would overcome both the limitations created by bandwidth expense and the impact of latency on application performance. In addition, the solution needed to integrate and operate well with LG Electronics' heterogeneous, complex infrastructure, including equipment from Cisco, Nortel and 3Com. The company turned to WDS solutions providers for the answer.

LG Electronics' project leader considered products from Expand Networks, Peribit (now part of Juniper Networks) and Riverbed, and performed extensive tests on Expand Networks' products, as well as Riverbed's Steelhead appliances.

"The Steelhead appliances performed better than the competition," said Kang-Seok Chung, senior manager, IT Infrastructure Group at LG Electronics. "They produced the fastest response times for the offerings tested and they supported more of our critical protocols. Riverbed also did a better job of reducing WAN traffic. Finally, the Steelhead appliances were the easiest to manage, which is a critical component to a successful global deployment as large as ours."

LG Electronics also saw significant bandwidth savings that delivered a payback period of five months. "Bandwidth is not cheap for international companies, especially in the Asia Pacific region," continued Mr. Chung. "But immediately after deploying the Steelhead appliances, we saw a reduction in bandwidth utilization of 40 per cent in critical parts of our global network. With Riverbed, we have reduced our bandwidth cost significantly, while creating faster access times for our remote employees."

After deploying the Steelhead appliances, LG Electronics' critical applications experienced immediate and significant performance results. For example, remote employees accessing eNet, the company's centralized Lotus-based intranet, enjoy performance that is up to 20 times faster than before. In addition, the purchase/sales/inventory application that could not be accessed from the Vladivostok office previously can now be accessed in just a few seconds, dramatically improving productivity for the remote office.