Firms Realize Improved Productivity, Better Use of Bandwidth With Riverbed's WDS Solution
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:RVBD) announced today that two law firms, Pepper Hamilton LLP and Loeb & Loeb LLP, as well as Electronic Evidence Discovery, Inc., a full-service electronic discovery company, have selected and deployed Riverbed’s Steelhead® wide-area data services (WDS) appliances in offices throughout the U.S. to accelerate the performance of applications across their networks. By using Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances to optimize the performance of applications between remote sites and make far better use of their bandwidth, all three companies have significantly improved employee efficiency and overall productivity.
Pepper Hamilton LLP Employs Steelhead Appliances to Improve Performance
Pepper Hamilton LLP, a multi-practice law firm with 450 lawyers, is headquartered in Philadelphia and has 10 other offices in seven states and Washington, D.C. The firm realized it needed to optimize its wide area network (WAN) when it decided to centralize email and document management. Previously, Pepper Hamilton had Microsoft Exchange 2003 servers at each site; now it has a consolidated, clustered Exchange environment. And instead of decentralized Docs Open for document management, it uses Interwoven FileSite, a client/server application.
Pepper Hamilton realized that adding bandwidth to its WAN would not be enough to achieve LAN-like performance. The firm conducted extensive research and found that some products were immature, some vendors were not well established, and some companies spread their resources too thin. Pepper Hamilton looked for an established company with a good reputation and experience in the legal community; the firm ultimately narrowed its choice to Riverbed® and its Steelhead appliances, and a product from another company. The IT department tested all the firm’s new centralized applications, sending documents from other sites to Philadelphia headquarters, using the Steelhead appliance at the Pittsburgh office and the other product in the Berwyn, Pennsylvania, office.
“Riverbed outperformed the competition by a factor of two in every application,” said Josette Marsh, CIO of Pepper Hamilton. “Reporting was easier with Riverbed; when we needed to get information, it was right there. The other product was more difficult to navigate. Plus, Riverbed and its channel partner, Voyant, were involved and always there to help. The other vendor was less involved, we didn’t have conversations with them, and they didn’t help us.”
Pepper Hamilton deployed Steelhead appliances in its 10 offices outside of Philadelphia in late August 2006 and quickly started seeing results. Overall network performance has improved, and the consolidation enabled by the Riverbed solution provides greater security and faster response to problems. Employees have noticed the difference that Riverbed makes, and the number of calls that come into the Helpdesk for WAN performance complaints has decreased tremendously.
Loeb & Loeb Manages Bandwidth with Steelhead Appliances
Loeb & Loeb is a multi-service national law firm with 250 attorneys headquartered in Los Angeles, with offices in New York, Chicago, and Nashville. Employees use the corporate LAN to access documents, send email, back up data, and replicate data for disaster recovery. However, the WAN was slow and data backup was bandwidth intensive, so Loeb & Loeb starting looking for a solution to its problems at the beginning of 2006.
As the firm researched solutions for improving application performance across the WAN, it soon realized that Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances had architecture and core technology that were more efficient and offered the best performance for the applications important to Loeb & Loeb. In addition, Loeb & Loeb CIO Judi Flournoy attended a conference where a peer spoke highly of Riverbed. But it was a test of Steelhead appliances that persuaded Loeb & Loeb to buy them.
“Our biggest reason for purchasing Steelhead appliances was to manage our bandwidth,” said Flournoy. “Users are saving and retrieving email and accessing applications, and backup traffic is running on top of user traffic, in the same pipe. All of this degrades performance, but with the Steelhead appliances we’ve improved performance across the network and made better use of our bandwidth.”
Since installing four Steelhead appliances in April, Loeb & Loeb has experienced a 65 percent overall reduction in bandwidth use, including a 95 percent reduction for document management and up to a 50 percent reduction when replicating data for disaster recovery. The firm now fully leverages its existing bandwidth, and staff can conduct disaster recovery backup across the WAN during the day rather than having to do it during off-peak hours at night. Employees are also more efficient. They see — and appreciate — the lower latency, which lets them transfer larger files and copies more quickly, and the network works more smoothly.
Loeb & Loeb purchased its Steelhead appliances from IT solutions provider Trace3, based in Irvine, California, which also provided training. The Steelhead appliances were easy to install and were up and running quickly, and IT has found that they are simple and easy to use.
Electronic Evidence Discovery Uncovers Riverbed’s Benefits
Electronic Evidence Discovery, Inc. (EED®) addresses the impact of electronic evidence on litigation, offering a hosted solution to support eDiscovery projects for law firms. The company’s production centers are housed at its Kirkland, Washington, headquarters and remote offices in New York City and Washington, D.C.; it also has nine sales offices.
EED manages most of its corporate electronic assets such as Word documents and Microsoft Exchange on file servers residing at its corporate headquarters, partly for security reasons and partly to avoid duplication of staff and equipment. In contrast, each EED production center has its own suite of production servers to support localized processing requirements demanded by its clients. Corporate issues associated with utilization of the WAN included up to 30-second delays opening application files from remote offices, prompting requests for dedicated servers by the affected employees. On the production front, EED wanted to share workload among resources between sites due to the varied nature of the jobs submitted through each local market. Yet, network latency made this an impractical solution for the majority of the workload. As a result, EED decided to invest in WAN optimization technologies that would benefit both the corporate and production environments across all of its locations.
“Other products we evaluated just weren’t in the same ball park as Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances,” said Tim Ryan, vice president of operations at EED. “Steelhead appliances are geared to our type of environment, where we need to move gigabytes and terabytes of data on a regular basis. Riverbed provided better price/performance and beat the competition in scalability as well; for instance, we can scale at headquarters without having to scale all our other offices. Plus, we can upgrade each new Steelhead appliance model when appropriate.”
When EED tested Steelhead appliances in April 2006, the IT staff immediately started receiving calls saying “What did you do to the network?” and “Don’t take this thing away.” Working with reseller Optimize Networks, EED deployed Steelhead appliances in its New York and Kirkland offices in late June and in its D.C. office in late October. Today, users no longer experience application performance issues, and production latency is down by 20 percent for the first copy and by 40 percent for the second. Now EED can assign staff to any project, regardless of where they are located. Employee productivity and user satisfaction have both improved. As such, Steelhead appliances are now part of EED’s operating expense model, helping the company manage growth, control costs, and ensure people are working productively.
About Riverbed’s Steelhead Appliances
Riverbed’s wide-area data services (WDS) solutions enable organizations with more than one office to overcome a host of severe problems, including poor application performance and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites. By speeding the performance of applications between distributed sites, by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times between enterprise datacenters and remote offices, Riverbed’s award-winning Steelhead WDS appliances enable companies to consolidate IT, improve backup and replication processes to ensure data integrity, and improve staff productivity and collaboration. Steelhead appliances 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 our 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, grow market share or grow the market as a whole. 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 Registration Statement on Form S-1 filed with the SEC, including the “Risk Factors” section in our final Prospectus dated September 20, 2006, and in our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on October 31, 2006. 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.
About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the performance 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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