Riverbed Steelhead® Appliances Deployed by a Global Retailer
to Improve Employee Productivity, Centralize Applications, and
Ease WAN-based Backup
Liz Claiborne Inc. designs and markets an extensive range of branded women’s and men’s apparel,
accessories and fragrance products. The company has a diverse portfolio of quality brands that are avail-
able domestically and internationally via wholesale and retail channels. Popular globally-known brands
in the Liz Claiborne portfolio include DKNY, Kenneth Cole NY, Kate Spade, Mexx, and Monet. The more
than 40 brands in the Liz Claiborne Inc. portfolio are available at over 30,000 points of sale worldwide.
Liz Claiborne (www.lizclaiborneinc.com) has locations across the globe, including distribution centers,
and management, sales, finance, and operations offices. Sites are located in North America, Eastern and
Western Europe, the Middle East, India, China and Southeast Asia. The business is expanding in Europe,
the Middle East, and Asia due to both acquisition and natural growth. To accommodate that growth
and integrate worldwide business operations, the company sought to deploy both custom applications
designed for the global retail business and improve response times of existing applications such as their
ERP application, and Microsoft Office, Exchange 2003, CommVault backup and SharePoint, over the
wide area network (WAN).
Challenge: Enabling Employees To Be Productive, Wherever They Are
Liz Claiborne is in a period of immense change. As recently noted to the financial community in its earn-
ings announcements, Claiborne is “committed to strategic acquisitions as part of our growth strategy.“
Yet, an aggressive growth strategy presents challenges for maintaining a high level of worker productivity.
“Our organization is very much a distributed
organization. We have sales, finance, operations,
and marketing professionals all over the world.
With our successful growth strategy in place, it’s
critical that all our employees – no matter where
they are –