Riverbed Expands Operations in North America

Opens Offices in Canada to Enable Global and Regional Enterprises to Speed Application Performance and Improve Collaboration.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: RVBD) announced today the launch of operations in Canada with the opening of offices in Toronto, Ontario. Riverbed's new Canadian office will allow Riverbed® to best meet the needs of distributed organizations throughout Canada as they seek to solve the problems associated with application performance over wide area networks (WANs).

“Riverbed’s first customer was a Canadian company,” said Jerry Kennelly, CEO and president of Riverbed. “Riverbed’s decision to expand operations in North America is driven by customer and partner demand, as organizations recognize the importance of optimizing WAN performance for a broad range of applications and services, including IT consolidation, backup and disaster recovery, and application acceleration. We look forward to working with our Canadian partners to meet the needs of distributed enterprises.”

Riverbed has developed relationships with leading reseller partners across Canada, including British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. As part of this release, Riverbed is announcing Canadian customers SECOR and Wardrop Engineering, both of which worked with partners to deploy Riverbed’s Steelhead® appliances.

SECOR was founded in 1975 and today is the largest independent strategy consulting firm in Canada, serving prestigious clients in North America and Europe. In addition to its Montreal offices, the company has operations in Paris and Toronto. The company is organized into three groups: SECOR Consulting assists top teams of large North American companies with strategic and global expansion concerns; SECOR Europe focuses on top teams of European companies; and SECOR-TAKTIK specializes in mid-sized Quebec companies that must constantly adapt to the changing realities of the market.

SECOR deployed a Microsoft SharePoint Intranet to enable collaboration between its three sites, including the ability to quickly and easily share large PowerPoint and Word documents. However, downloads of typical files of 25-30 MB often took 10-12 minutes to open and file replication was nearly impossible. The company turned to Montreal-based NOVIPRO for a solution. NOVIPRO is a rapidly growing company and registered Riverbed reseller that has, since 1993, successfully implemented IT projects for small, medium and large sized businesses. NOVIPRO has developed a unique approach that capitalizes on the skills of its team to address its clients' challenges in areas that include technological infrastructure design, software solutions, IT recovery, archiving and other IT issues. NOVIPRO recommended that SECOR consider Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances to enable collaboration between the company’s North American and European sites. Following installation of the Steelhead appliances, the same files that once took 10-12 minutes to download now take 10-12 seconds.

“Riverbed has delivered performance beyond our expectations,” said Joanne Couture, Director – Service to Professionals at SECOR. “Our users in Paris are now working as if they were in Montreal. Riverbed has delivered LAN-like quality over our WAN.”

In addition to improving application performance, the Steelhead appliances have reduced the amount of traffic traversing the network from 1.34 GB to 291 MB, a 5X decrease, freeing bandwidth and allowing the company to delay a bandwidth upgrade indefinitely.

Wardrop Engineering has also deployed Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances. Wardrop is an award-winning international consulting firm providing innovative solutions through integrated multi-disciplined engineering, environmental, and information technology services. The company has a team of more than 850 from which to draw expertise, and was recently named, for the fifth time, to the list of Canada’s Top 100 Employers. Wardrop specializes in the forest products, infrastructure, product development, mining and minerals, nuclear, oil and gas, and power sectors.

Wardrop has sites across Canada and in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Teams often work collaboratively, transferring a variety of documents, including very large computer-aided design (CAD) files, across the country. In addition, Wardrop has a centralized Oracle-based financial and project management application, located in its Winnipeg office. With a hybrid network that includes centralized, regional and local IT, the company needed a flexible solution that would allow them to speed both the transfers of files and access to its centralized database, while accommodating the design of its network. Wardrop attempted to overcome its performance issues across the WAN with raw bandwidth; however, performance was still unacceptable.

Working closely with Gibraltar Solutions, a registered Riverbed reseller and value-added solution provider, the company deployed Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances as a solution. Gibraltar Solutions optimizes large enterprise IT environments, with compelling value, in the areas of infrastructure consolidation, virtualization solutions, access solutions, application distribution, security assessment/operations, as well as process/project management. To-date, Wardrop has deployed Steelhead appliances at 12 sites across Canada and in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“Riverbed accommodates the flexible nature of our business where project teams are based in different parts of the country,” said Bill Ip, CIO at Wardrop. “In smaller offices, we have been able to reduce the number of email and file data servers. Employees remotely work as if local. Having the Steelhead appliances deployed at all of our sites gives us the flexibility to allow all employees access to all data, regardless of location.”

Wardrop has also reduced bandwidth usage by up to 5X, allowing the company to reduce its current expenditure on bandwidth and delay future network upgrades.

“Users are now able to efficiently and quickly get data from other offices,” continued Ip. “With the Riverbed-enabled performance, remote users are not even aware that they are accessing files over the WAN. Based on the performance, they assume that they are opening local files.”