Wolverine Worldwide Sees 200% Increase in Product Development Speed

To remain competitive, Wolverine needed to increase its speed to market. Which meant they needed a solution that would allow them to provide their global users fast and reliable access to their business-critical application. Wolverine business leadership required that the solution be in production for users in the United States, Europe, and China within 120 days of the project start. Due to processor requirements needed to run the application and the single database, a typical on-premise solution would not meet their global user’s needs.

The RomansCAD® application that Wolverine uses runs on a centralized database. It must reside in one location and cannot be distributed globally. Wolverine’s power users had significant

3D graphical rendering requirements within the application, and the Task Worker Use Case required access to the application for data entry.

Wolverine tried to make this solution work via their existing infrastructure by moving their Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment into their demilitarized zone (DMZ) while using on-premise NVIDIA graphics cards in their servers. Unfortunately, this solution didn’t deliver the required performance to their end-users in China who needed 3D graphical rendering. The China power users experienced too much latency to do their jobs effectively. Wolverine also set up the RomansCAD® application in an Azure China data center for data entry end-users and used scripts to synchronize the database with the main production database. Again, this solution was determined untenable for the long-term and did not solve the main challenge to provide 3D rendering to Wolverine power users in both China and the United States.