Riverbed Helps The Gem Group Accelerate Collaboration Between U.S. and China
Riverbed WDS Speeds Global Access to MS SQL, Exchange, and Printing to Support Offshoring Operations
San Francisco, CA — November 19, 2007 — Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced that The Gem Group, Inc. has selected and successfully deployed Riverbed’s Steelhead® appliances in its Lawrence, MA headquarters and offshore manufacturing operations in Shenzhen, China. With Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances, The Gem Group employees are able to quickly access large files and collaborate in real-time on the design of new products, which has dramatically improved productivity and shortened time-to-market for new products developed by the company — all while maintaining lower cost and easier-to-manage centralized IT infrastructure.
The Gem Group, which includes the popular Gemline® products and services, is a global leader in producing targeted products to promote brand awareness. In 2001, the Company moved its offshore sourcing and design facility to a new 55,000 square foot facility in Southern China. Headquarters, located in Lawrence, MA, has been expanded to 155,000 square feet. The Gem Group now has over 600 employees worldwide and manufactures an extensive line of branded products, including clothing, business accessories, gifts, sports gear, and other branded items.
Offshoring continues to mature from manufacturing and assembly to more upstream and downstream areas such as engineering, production, and service. At the same time, small and medium-sized businesses are beginning to send some products offshore, creating a new set of business challenges. According to Roland Berger Strategy Consulting, the proportion of medium-sized firms with international operations will rise from 60 percent to 75 percent in 2007, and for small firms from 40 percent to over 60 percent. Furthermore, over 70 percent of offshoring projects proved successful in 2006, and were not reversed, according to Roland Berger.
The Gem Group’s objective was to reduce costs and save time in processing custom orders on a 24x7 basis for customers of its branded product portfolio. With Riverbed®, they were able to meet a three-month mandate to deploy applications and streamlined processes to the China office. Typically, the company does extensive research on IT products; for example, they evaluated products for a recent storage area networking (SAN) project for nine months. With Riverbed, The Gem Group was able to complete the evaluation in one week and make a purchase decision within one month. The company chose not to test other WDS vendors, like Cisco or Juniper for three reasons. First, they knew Riverbed was the industry leader in WDS. Second, testing Riverbed was fast and easy, and third, the Riverbed test results were very compelling and exceeded expectations.
Furthermore, the initial research The Gem Group did on competitive offerings from Cisco and Juniper revealed that these technologies were not able to meet their requirements as comprehensively as Riverbed’s Steelhead products. They also looked at Citrix, but when it came to managing their artwork across the wide-area network (WAN) it would not fit their needs.
“We tested our Mediabank Digital Asset Management application using Riverbed. This application is very bandwidth intensive because it is our repository for the continuous production of large art files. Prior to Riverbed, it was not feasible to access it across our WAN links - it just didn’t work. With Riverbed, the China office is now able to access Mediabank from the corporate network,” said Brian Smith, system technology manager, The Gem Group. “With Riverbed, application response time was dramatically reduced from five minutes to just seconds. We also saw email, file, and print traffic (MAPI/SMTP, CIFS & printer) optimized by over 80 percent. These throughput improvements allowed us to forego the purchase of additional bandwidth we had been facing.”
In addition, with Riverbed, The Gem Group was able to keep the application centrally located, thus reducing additional hardware and software costs and the management complexity of a distributed IT infrastructure.
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 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 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:
Riverbed Technology
Kristalle Ward, 415-247-8140
kristalle.ward@riverbed.com
or
Horn Group for Riverbed Technology
Krista Canfield, 415-905-4011
kcanfield@horngroup.com
