SAN FRANCISCO – October 22, 2008 – Riverbed Technology (Nasdaq: RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced that Leica Geosystems has deployed Riverbed® Steelhead® appliances to improve collaboration among team members across more than 20 office locations worldwide. The WDS implementation supported the company’s expansion of small, globally dispersed offices with minimal IT investment while optimizing application performance.
Leica Geosystems products and services are trusted by professionals worldwide to help them capture, analyze, and present spatial information. Leica Geosystems is best known for its broad array of products that capture accurately, model quickly, analyze easily, and visualize and present spatial information. Based in Heerbrugg, Switzerland, Leica Geosystems is a global company with tens of thousands of customers supported by more than 3,500 employees in 28 countries and hundreds of partners located in more than 120 countries around the world.
Leica Geosystems recently began opening a number of new, small offices across the globe. The original IT strategy was to have dedicated Lotus Notes and File servers in each office; however, the infrastructure costs associated with this approach were too expensive.
Ingo Peterlunger, Leica Geosystems’ IT global network engineer explains, “To support the growth of small offices, our IT budget would have been strained with the attempt to support two servers for each office, including a Windows user license, back-up and virus scanning. We decided a consolidation effort would be the best strategy, but feared our employees’ application performance would be sacrificed.”
Leica Geosystems’ consolidation effort consisted of supporting the Collaboration and File servers at the hub locations that support several new offices. Leica Geosystems’ concern regarding user performance led to its search for a WDS solution. Working with Action-One AG, a Riverbed partner, Leica tested several WDS alternatives, but chose Riverbed because its solutions showcased the best application performance and ease-of-deployment.
Leica Geosystems has currently deployed 21 Steelhead appliances to 20 offices, and the results have been impressive. “Before Riverbed, we had to install up to two servers at each branch location,” recalls Peterlunger. “Thanks to Riverbed these local servers are no longer required. This alone has saved us from purchasing and managing around 20 to 30 servers.” Installing the Riverbed Steelhead appliances is a simple process. “The staging of the box is carried out at our IT headquarters, and usually takes around 15 minutes. We then send it out to the branch office, where it is installed by one of the employees on site. It really is that quick and easy.”
There have been other benefits as well, Peterlunger explains. “We had deployed a new web-based CRM system in Asia but employees complained of poor performance due to latency issues. Installing the Riverbed Steelhead appliances fixed this problem overnight. File download times went from 1-2 minutes prior to deployment to 10-15 seconds after installation of the Steelhead appliances. Our users in Asia can now work with the CRM system, and that was almost impossible before the Riverbed WDS solution.”
Based on its success with the Steelhead appliances, Leica Geosystems now plans to look at the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) in order to run print servers and DNS functionality on the Steelhead appliances. These capabilities will further the company’s IT consolidation efforts. To support employee growth and its geographically dispersed sales team, Leica hopes to take advantage of the Riverbed mobile client.
Steelhead Products
Riverbed WDS solutions enable organizations of all sizes to overcome a host of severe problems, including poor application performance and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites. By speeding the performance of applications between data centers, remote offices and mobile workers by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times, Riverbed’s award-winning Steelhead WDS products enable companies to consolidate IT, improve backup and replication processes to ensure data integrity, and improve staff productivity and collaboration. Steelhead products have been deployed in organizations ranging from the world’s largest corporations with offices around the globe to small companies with a couple of sites that are just miles apart. To learn more, view Riverbed’s demo: www.riverbed.com/pr/jack.
Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed's products and services, and statements relating to Riverbed’s ability to meet the needs of distributed organizations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed’s business are set forth in our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on July 29, 2008. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Any future product, feature or related specification that may be referenced in this release are for information purposes only and are not commitments to deliver any technology or enhancement. Riverbed reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time.
About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS) solutions for companies worldwide. By enabling application performance over the wide area network (WAN) that is orders of magnitude faster than what users experience today, Riverbed is changing the way people work, and enabling a distributed workforce that can collaborate as if they were local. Additional information about Riverbed (Nasdaq: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com.
Riverbed Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead, RiOS, Interceptor, and the Riverbed logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
MEDIA CONTACT
Kristalle Ward
Riverbed Technology
415-247-8140
Kristalle.Ward@riverbed.com
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