Riverbed Accelerates AutoCAD for AEC Firms

Riverbed Technology announced that architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) firms utilizing Autodesk’s AutoCAD 2010 software will experience the same performance benefits that Riverbed customers using AutoCAD have seen for years.

Based on results of tests performed by Riverbed and Autodesk, Riverbed WAN optimization solutions can accelerate AutoCAD 2010 by up to 100 times – while typically cutting WAN bandwidth consumption by 50% to 90%. By dramatically accelerating the performance of AutoCAD 2010 over the WAN, distributed AEC firms can quickly access large files for the design and development of new projects, resulting in real-time collaboration for employees in multi-site environments, and a reduction in operational and IT financial investments.

AEC firms depend heavily on AutoCAD to bring efficiencies to the design process and to tackle their most challenging design problems, using its robust 3D free-form design tools and powerful drafting and documentation capabilities. While the application is an outstanding tool for firms to standardize on for design purposes, organizations have found that the drawing files can sometimes exceed hundreds of megabytes in size on larger projects, which can impact employees’ ability to collaborate effectively. As a result, for firms with distributed offices or a global presence, sharing and collaborating on large CAD documents can often lead to significant delays in accessing drawings during normal file open and save operations. For this reason, many of the world’s leading AEC firms utilize Riverbed Steelhead® appliances to accelerate the performance of their key applications so architects and engineers can collaborate between offices around the world as if they were in the same room.

"Our employees need to share their AutoCAD design work, in real time, regardless of where they are located — it’s our bread and butter. New employees, and our clients, have commented on how effectively our project teams can deliver together regardless of the fact that many employees are working in different offices," said Ray Sirois, director of IT at Wright-Pierce. "Our initial testing results of AutoCAD 2010 in our Riverbed Steelhead environment are very encouraging. We see a noticeable improvement right out of the box. It is encouraging to see larger companies like Autodesk and Riverbed working together to be responsive to the needs of multi-office firms like Wright-Pierce."

Riverbed WAN optimization solutions can have a huge and immediate impact on the productivity of engineers and architects using AutoCAD 2010. Organizations that once waited 30 minutes to open a drawing can now access it in seconds. As a result, organizations experience a boost in application performance, allowing employees to collaborate in real-time; and IT managers see immediate cost savings by eliminating the need to purchase additional bandwidth.

"AutoCAD is a powerful 2D and 3D application that allows organizations to incorporate extreme detail into meticulous designs. With the significant upgrades we’ve incorporated into AutoCAD 2010, such as free-form design tools, parametric drawing and enhanced PDF support – we expect a large percentage of our customers to upgrade to the new format," said Eric Stover, AutoCAD Product Line Manager, Autodesk. "We’re confident that customers upgrading to AutoCAD 2010 will benefit from the impressive acceleration capabilities provided by Riverbed. Our teams have worked closely on engineering to ensure productivity and performance to our customers."

"Companies are striving to accelerate the performance of their IT infrastructure while minimizing their financial investments. Many customers select Riverbed to enhance the technologies they already have to make them faster, smarter and more efficient," said Alan Saldich, vice president of product marketing and alliances at Riverbed. "We have hundreds of customers using various versions of AutoCAD and other Autodesk products, and they all experience performance gains when using our WAN optimization solution. Organizations implementing AutoCAD 2010 with Riverbed will be able to provide a more collaborative work environment while cutting costs."