Cancer Society Selects Riverbed to Consolidate IT, Speed Data Transfer
Riverbed's Award-Winning Steelhead Appliances Enable the Canadian Cancer Society to Quickly and Cost-Effectively Accelerate Collaboration Across Ontario Offices
San Francisco, CA — November 5, 2007 — Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced that the Canadian Cancer Society, Ontario Division, has selected and successfully deployed Riverbed's Steelhead® WDS appliances. The deployment enabled the Society to consolidate its IT resources for data protection, while also benefiting from substantial data transfer acceleration.
The Society is a national community-based organization of volunteers whose mission is to eradicate cancer and to enhance the quality of life of people living with cancer. It is the largest charitable funder of cancer research in Canada. Last year, the Society contributed close to $47 million to fund a broad spectrum of cancer research – including basic laboratory, behavioral, palliative care, and prevention research and research that will directly impact clinical practices and treatment. It has two national offices (in Toronto and Ottawa), 10 provincial and territorial divisions, and more than 600 community locations. Currently the Society's Ontario division has more than 70,000 volunteers who work along with about 470 dedicated staff members across the province.
The search for a solution began when staff at the Society's Ontario division realized they needed to replace some old legacy servers. Gerry Holmes, the division's director of information technology, reviewed several options including a costly network and server upgrade. After doing some research, Holmes determined that even with the upgrade option the Society would not receive the same performance increases that a Riverbed® WDS implementation would provide. Additionally, if the upgraded network or servers went down, the Society's remote sites could be out of commission for days before replacement equipment could be shipped to the site and a technician could install it. Despite having over 40 locations throughout Ontario, some of the Society's remote sites are located up to twenty hours away by car; so this was simply not an option. With Riverbed's solution, technicians hardly ever need to go to the remote sites. User-friendly deployment enables local employees to install the solution, so all the IT department needs to do is simply send the office a box.
Holmes was especially impressed by Gartner's positioning of Riverbed in the 'WAN Optimization Controller Magic Quadrant.' "Riverbed's placement in that particular report definitely came into play when we decided to research various WDS solutions," said Holmes. The Society ultimately selected Riverbed's Steelhead appliances because Riverbed was easier to deploy than other solutions and did not require additional changes to its routers. The Society also liked the fact that Riverbed's solution worked seamlessly without any alterations to its existing network.
"By implementing Riverbed's solution, we were able to consolidate file servers from our more remote sites, which reduced the maintenance load for our IT department and also enabled us to provide better data protection for our staff," said Holmes. "Riverbed's products also gave our end users LAN-like application performance across the wide area network (WAN), which ensured end user satisfaction and collaboration across all of our locations."
To date, the Society has deployed 13 Riverbed Steelhead appliances as well as Riverbed's Central Management Console (CMC) to manage all Steelhead appliances from a central location. By the first quarter of 2008, the Society team plans to add a Steelhead appliance in all 27 of its remaining offices. It also intends to install a redundant storage area network (SAN) during that timeframe.
"The entire system is more efficient and involves less maintenance than ever before," says Holmes. "In fact, when we centralized our file servers to our headquarters, our customers did not even detect that the local file server had been moved. That's how seamless our deployment was."
About The Magic Quadrant
The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2006 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
About the Canadian Cancer Society
The Canadian Cancer Society is a national community-based organization of volunteers whose mission is to eradicate cancer and to improve the quality of life of people living with cancer. When you want to know more about cancer, visit www.cancer.ca or call the Society's toll-free, bilingual Cancer Information Service at 1-888-939-3333.
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.
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, and statements relating to the WDS market opportunity and Riverbed's revenue growth. 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.
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.
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Media Contacts:
Kristalle Ward
Riverbed Technology
(415) 274-8140
kristalle.ward@riverbed.com
Krista Canfield
Horn Group for Riverbed Technology
(415) 905-4011
kcanfield@horngroup.com
Gartner Research "WAN Optimization Controller Magic Quadrant" by Andy Rolfe and Joe Skorupa, October 4, 2006
