At first blush, non-profits wouldn't seem to be a good fit for Riverbed's products. But, non-profits are very sensitive to their expenses; that means that any way to save money is very attractive. Steelhead appliances can help non-profits save a considerable amount of money on IT; the ROI is often well under one year, even for relatively small deployments.

One of Riverbed's customers is a mental health agency in Texas. This agency is one of the 25 largest such agencies in the United States, and they serve 20,000 people per year. They maintain offices throughout a county in Texas, and although the distances aren't too large by global standards, they are enough that the agency was having trouble maintaining sufficient performance to meet their needs. By deploying Steelhead appliances, they were able to save considerably on bandwidth upgrades, as well as offer better performance for their remote sites.

Another non-profit customer – a county library in the Seattle, Washington area – was able to improve the performance of their branch library applications, and avoid a potentially costly upgrade of their local WAN links by deploying Steelhead appliances. Rather than going to an expensive private network to try to provide higher-quality response times for their applications, they have been able to stick with their current approach of a low bandwidth, low cost network.