Aelia Deploys Riverbed's WDS Solutions Across European Network
Steelhead Appliances Deliver LAN-Like SAP Performance and Improve Inter-Office Collaboration; Enable Replication and Backup of
Critical Data
San Francisco, CA — October 29, 2007 — Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), announced today that Aelia, one of the leading travel retailers in Europe, has selected and deployed Riverbed's Steelhead® WDS appliances at sites in France, the UK, and Poland. With Riverbed's Steelhead appliances, Aelia has accelerated core application performance, including SAP and Lotus Notes, allowing distributed employees to collaborate with distant co-workers, regardless of location or time zone.
Aelia has revenues of over 500 million Euros from over 130 sales points. Specializing in airport retail, Aelia is also active in mainline travel retail networks, catering to the specifics of each environment, like airports, in-flight sales, Euro tunnel, and ferries. Aelia operates at 16 airports in France, the UK, and Poland. Aelia operates in-flight sales for the largest international and regional airlines through its subsidiary AIR.
Aelia sought to improve application performance between remote sites, while at the same time consolidating storage resources to control costs and simplify security management. Aelia's highly distributed workforce utilizes SAP both in GUI (fat client) and Intranet (thin client), plus Lotus Notes for email and collaboration. In a centralized IT environment, Aelia employees everywhere would need access to files and enterprise systems located on distant servers on a regular and timely basis. Aelia's IT staff recognized that the distributed nature of the corporation, combined with centralized IT, would make collaboration between offices difficult and impractical, as latency would likely slow the performance of centralized applications. The company sought to overcome this dilemma with WDS.
Olivier Rideau, systems and production group manager at Aelia, recalled the process for analyzing WDS solutions: "We wanted to make sure we did a full analysis of the marketplace. We considered a number of products, but primarily focused on Cisco and Riverbed®. We considered the Cisco WAAS products for testing; however, they were not mature enough to provide the efficiency we needed."
Rideau continued, "With Riverbed, the key attraction was the Steelhead appliance's capability to optimize in a consistent and unique way all kinds of data, from simple files to email or the Web. Our testing also showed significant bandwidth savings. In addition, Riverbed's simplified management and deployment were important to us. This combination of easy deployment with fast application performance made Riverbed the right solution."
To date, Aelia has deployed Steelhead appliances at 14 remote sites and at corporate headquarters. According to Rideau, "Riverbed made deployment to sites across the globe completely painless."
Following deployment of the Steelhead appliances, Aelia consolidated its IT infrastructure, removing servers and data backup equipment from 14 remote offices that did not have a local IT manager. This effort both reduced costs and is allowing Aelia to better comply with security regulations. At the same time, centralized data management is both more simple and secure.
When asked to comment on the impact of the Riverbed implementation, Rideau said, "The Steelhead appliances have allowed us to change the way we deploy remote infrastructure and backup remote data. We no longer need to maintain as much remote IT infrastructure." And, employee productivity has not been compromised. "In some ways we actually improved productivity, as everyone is now working with the same data source. The acceleration in WAN traffic means that employees can exchange large files without worrying where the data is actually stored," said Rideau.
When asked to sum up his experience with Riverbed, Rideau said, "Many people just think about bandwidth savings. We certainly found Riverbed to be much more effective than any of the other alternatives at optimizing bandwidth, but that is only half of the story. The combination of bandwidth optimization coupled with protocol acceleration resulted in an average throughput increase of 40X."
Steelhead Products
Riverbed's 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.
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.
Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed's products and services and 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 October 25, 2007. 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.
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.
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Media Contacts:
Kim Kapustka
(415) 344-4476
kim@riverbed.com
Robb Henshaw
Horn Group for Riverbed Technology
(415) 905-4028
rhenshaw@horngroup.com
