Riverbed Technology announced that its Riverbed Steelhead appliance running the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) version 4.0 has achieved SAP Certified Integration for third-party networking appliances that interoperate with SAP solutions using the SAP NetWeaver platform and an enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA). Enterprise SOA enables customers to create a highly-flexible, open IT architecture for developing services-based, enterprise-scale business solutions. With SAP's certification of integration of the Riverbed Steelhead appliance, customers can be assured of interoperability within SAP application-based landscapes.

"Over 3,500 enterprises worldwide rely on Riverbed's solutions for the acceleration of the broad set of applications important to their businesses, including solutions from SAP AG," said Venugopal Pai, senior director, alliances at Riverbed. "In real-world tests, customers running SAP solutions who have deployed Riverbed's WDS solutions have seen performance improvements of up to 5X and reductions in data of up to 99%. With SAP's rigorous testing of our products, these enterprises can now also be assured that our products integrate with SAP solutions to reduce bandwidth utilization and improve end-user response times."

SAP has added new network integration certification scenarios around wide area network (WAN) acceleration and optimization to its integration certification program based on increased demand by customers for solutions in these areas. Certification was overseen by the SAP Integration and Certification Center (ICC) and conducted at the SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Palo Alto, California. The SAP ICC certification of the Riverbed Steelhead appliance running RiOS 4.0 was granted based on the following certification category: Network Performance Optimization for Enterprise SOA. Within this category, the following was tested:

Certified General Functions:

• Functional correctness
• Performance preservation
• Secure, encrypted communication

Certified Performance Optimization Functions:

• Reducing CPU load of SAP application server by 10% or more
• Reducing end-user response time over WAN by 30% or more
• Lowering bandwidth by 30% or more

Riverbed Appliances and SAP NetWeaver Performance
Steelhead appliances help accelerate application modules running over WANs on the SAP NetWeaver platform. With Riverbed's WDS solutions, organizations adopting enterprise SOA can achieve global network scalability while improving accessibility to data and applications from remote sites. Steelhead appliances cut the amount of time it takes to perform an array of operations on SAP NetWeaver-based servers in a distributed environment to improve employee productivity and better leverage an enterprise SOA.

In real world tests, RiOS helped enterprises eliminate up to 99% of traffic on SAP NetWeaver-based servers for specific application modules resulting in an increase in bandwidth capacity of up to 17x. In addition, RiOS accelerates HTTP and HTTPS traffic, which helps to further improve performance of SAP NetWeaver over the WAN. The acceleration delivered by Riverbed enhances the usability of platform applications and increases end-user satisfaction.

The above test results show that Riverbed Steelhead appliances significantly accelerate specific operations of SAP NetWeaver over the WAN, while also reducing bandwidth utilization. In recent tests, validating purchase information was completed up to 5 times faster and saving purchase orders were completed 3 times faster.