Credit: Dreamstime
Negros Women for Tomorrow Foundation (NWTF), a Philippines-based micro-finance organisation, has leveraged Riverbed to boost network reliability and performance through next-generation infrastructure.
The institution - one of the country’s largest and oldest - has rolled out software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) offerings to connect over 120 branch sites and expand access to financial services in remote areas.
In helping women move out of poverty and achieve self-sufficiency and self-reliance through micro-loans, NWTF employees almost 3,500 staff and serves close to 450,000 clients, operating across over 10 islands in the Philippines.
“Connectivity in rural Philippines is spotty and unreliable at best - only 40-45 per cent of the communities NWTF serves has a stable internet connection,” said Raymond Serios, assistant director of NWTF. “Providing our clients with access to life-changing financial services required a fundamental rethink of our network.
“We chose to partner with Riverbed on the journey because of their market leadership as well as their simple, intelligent approach to modern networking: combining the capabilities of SD-WAN, application acceleration and visibility into a single solution and make it incredibly easy to manage.”
According to Serios, NWTF’s legacy network was challenged with “limited growth, agility and low digital performance”, with manual changes resulting in higher running costs.
Serios said Riverbed offers SD-WAN and application acceleration capabilities which “drastically simplify” networking, while improving visibility and control over IT infrastructure.
“Beyond the technical benefits, the Riverbed solution and the support we received from the team along the way have been instrumental in empowering us in our mission to help lift our clients out of poverty,” Serios added.
“They were there every step of the way - from implementation to support to traveling to the furthest corners our operation to help us deliver an amazing experience to our clients.”
