Merck, the oldest pharmaceutical and chemical company in the world, discusses its IT partnership with Orange Business Services and the need for application performance in its global business. In a global business environment such as Merck's, networks and applications need to be fast, while the business is challenged to consolidate and reduce operating costs. Merck has worked with Orange since 1998 and most recently standardized their email infrastructure and is working on optimizing live webcast streaming. To improve application performance, Merck deployed 104 Riverbed appliances worldwide to provide speed and transparency on their global network, resulting in bandwidth improvements ranging from 50 to 90%, depending on the application.