Hydro-Québec: Concurrent Engineering is Possible Over a WAN, With Riverbed

Hydro-Québec wanted to practice concurrent engineering but wasn't able to make it work due to the long distances between its headquarters and partners' offices throughout the province. The problem: transferring CATIA and SmarTeam data over a WAN was too slow to permit real-time collaboration. Even day-to-day use of CATIA at the remote sites was agonizingly slow. Some possible work-arounds were too expensive (dedicated CATIA servers at each site) or didn't work satisfactorily (remote desktop/thin client). Riverbed WAN optimization delivered an affordable and easy-to-deploy solution that has "exceeded expectations." The Riverbed solution cost about half what the company might have spent on other approaches, and consolidation has accounted for $1.5 million in avoided costs as well.