Application Performance & Collaboration

"By choosing Riverbed we not only avoided expensive bandwidth upgrade costs but also improved user productivity. Steelhead appliances are an essential component of our IT infrastructure. That’s how important Riverbed is to us now."
—Chris Ireland, Global Network Manager, Lucy Switchgear

Many enterprises believe WAN optimization simply reduces bandwidth utilization. But optimizing the network in this way — via compression, QoS, or TCP optimization — is only one part of the solution needed to truly improve application performance across the network and increase employee collaboration.

Unlike other approaches to application acceleration, Riverbed® WAN optimization solutions can provide dramatic application performance increases across the broad range of  applications that enterprises care about the most. Applications run five, 50, or even up to 100 times faster so that branch office and mobile workers can collaborate in real-time, design documents, Excel files, even send large email attachments at blazing speeds, around the world. Riverbed also gives your business visibility into its IT infrastructure so you can analyze whether your resources are being used in the best way.

Our comprehensive solution:

• Accelerates applications across the WAN, typically by five, 50, or even 100 times
• Delivers LAN-like performance to branch office and mobile workers around the world
• Improves the productivity of branch office and mobile workers and enables your company to do more with less
• Speeds file downloads
• Enhances visibility and simplifies management
• Reduces computing times and improves employee collaboration
• Lowers IT, operational, and training costs, and helps you avoid costly network upgrades

Riverbed delivers faster application response times, improved staff collaboration, more agile infrastructure at reduced IT costs, and lower bandwidth costs.

Read the Steelhead Mobile Product Brief
Read the Steelhead Mobile 3.0 Data Sheet

"Thanks to Riverbed, we have work done in Shanghai by people in Denver. That was completely undoable in the past."
—Chris Ireland, Global Network Manager, Lucy Switchgear

Businesses move at light speeds today. They not only need a fast mobile workforce but also high performance, scalable IT solutions that match their business growth, and visibility into the IT infrastructure.

Riverbed solves the application performance challenge with WAN optimization.

Steelhead® appliances from Riverbed outperform the competition by improving a company’s ability to deliver fast data services to remote offices, without having to install servers in every location. With Steelhead Mobile, data moves faster to any PC or laptop — mobile workers, home offices, and very small branch offices. Employees can download and send data as if they were in the office, be productive, and collaborate more.

Our appliances scale to any branch office, saving you thousands of dollars in reduced operating costs.

We provide visibility tools for management with at-a glance reporting on optimization and traffic visibility. Riverbed Cascade® analyzes traffic for faster problem resolution to improve the performance and availability of business services. Your team gains valuable insights into networks, applications, and servers. All in all, Riverbed solutions address all of the factors of accelerated data delivery, productivity, and scalability at a reduced infrastructure cost.

Improve Employee Productivity

Speed applications, raise productivity, and eliminate the impact of distance between remote offices, mobile workers, the data center, and business headquarters.

• Improve the performance of many of the most commonly used applications across the network, typically by 5-50 times and in some cases by up to 100 times.
• Accelerate operations by reducing the time required to complete repetitive operations.
• Ensure fast, reliable access to data and applications for employees around the globe; achieve LAN-like performance for mobile employees, no matter where they are; promote real-time collaboration, enable distributed collaboration and outsourcing, and streamline communications.
• Transfer data faster and complete transactions in record speeds, even in remote locations.
• Free up employees to spend more time with the customer and less time on the computer.

Improve Inter-Office Collaboration

Deliver strategic value to the company while helping your employees contribute and collaborate globally, anywhere, anytime.

• Faster application response times improve inter-office collaboration and industry competitiveness.
• Physical location is no longer a limitation; anyone can work on any project from anywhere.
• Work with large-size files in a distributed manner on wide-area networks.
• Reduce product development times and quicken product-to-market times

Increased Infrastructure Agility at Reduced Costs

Give senior management visibility into the IT infrastructure. Make better business decisions that save money, resources, and efficiencies. Elevate your IT group from just providing a utility to contributing meaningfully to the business.

• Acceleration — Maximize WAN optimization in all locations where your company does business. Optimize applications, servers, and networks in the branch office, out in the field, and in primary and secondary data centers. Improve time to market, enable follow-the-sun development models, enhance workload balancing, and gain flexibility for your business.
• Analysis — Analyze whether your resources are being used best for your business. Accelerate key applications and control your resources to best suit your enterprise needs.
• Visibility — Cascade is the only network visibility solution that uses behavior-based technologies to analyze traffic, speed problem resolution, and improve the performance of business services.
• Performance — Simultaneously address bandwidth constraints, TCP behavior in high latency networks, and inefficiencies in the applications themselves; provide significant acceleration for all key applications that cross the WAN.
• Agility — Respond to changing business needs quickly, without ballooning your budget, make your IT infrastructure much more nimble, locate data centers anywhere — and move them in a fraction of the time.

Cut Costs & Realize ROI

Target investments that actually cut costs and prepare for the future. Present a strategy that delivers savings today and greater opportunity in the future.

• Cut costs today — WAN optimization reduces bandwidth upgrades for two years or more in some cases. Free up budget for the bottom line and for other critical projects. Avoid router upgrades and server refreshes, and enable greater consolidation.
• Mobility as cost-savings strategy — Using WAN optimization software for mobile users allows them to be connected to the enterprise as if they were working in an office. With that level of performance, users can work from home more frequently and reduce the burden on companies in terms of branch office operating costs and real estate investments.
• Realize ROI — WAN optimization allows your company to realize ROI on other projects. CRM, ERP, disaster recovery, and communications platforms benefit from greater performance. WAN optimization makes these new projects perform better over the WAN, accelerates user adoption, and costs less to implement.
• Prepare the business for the future — WAN optimization allows businesses to cut costs now because it's an enabling technology across the complete enterprise. A small investment now can prepare the business to grow rapidly when the time is right. New IT projects can be deployed faster. IT teams can be more responsive to business needs in good times or bad.

Read Fast Facts: 10 Reasons to Deploy WAN Optimization in a Downturn

"With Cascade, we can provide senior management with information on the IT infrastructure that can help them make better business decisions that save money, resources, and efficiencies."
—Christophe Duprat, IT director, International Herald Tribune

For most users, being out of the office generally means that they are significantly less productive. They have limited access to key data and applications, and co-workers generally accept that collaboration will be difficult. With a mobile WAN optimization solution like Steelhead Mobile, mobile workers can now have the same LAN-like access to applications and data that employees in the office have. Applications can run 5, 50, or even up to 100 times faster, increasing employee productivity and inter-office collaboration.

Riverbed goes a step further to provide a complete solution to the application performance challenge. We address bandwidth constraints, TCP's behavior in high latency networks, and inefficiencies in the applications themselves. Riverbed’s Cascade provides application-level visibility into your IT infrastructure, so you can create global controls that allow your business to deliver the performance it needs.

Read the International Herald Tribune case study

Enhance Mobile Worker Performance

Realize dramatic performance improvements across global workforce.

• Accelerate application performance, typically by 5-50 times and, in some cases, by up to 100 times. Get more out of the applications your business relies on every day, including file sharing, email, backup, SSL, document management systems, IT tools, SharePoint, SAP, and ERP and CRM solutions.
• Adapt fast WAN optimization technology to any individual PC, including mobile workers, temporary locations, and very small offices
• Ensure fast, reliable access to data and applications for employees around the globe
• Achieve LAN-like performance for mobile employees, no matter where they are. Drive faster performance to primary and secondary data centers for DR processes.
• Improve daily survey response times that historically take 60-90 minutes, and now take fewer than 3 minutes. Managers and employees can spend more time interacting with customers instead of waiting for files to download in the back office.

Accelerate Enterprise Applications

Accelerate applications, download files faster, and lower costs.

• Optimize applications, servers, and networks
• Accelerate performance across a broad range of applications: SSL, File Sharing, Microsoft, Microsoft Sharepoint, Database, CAD, ERP, SAP, Lotus Notes, FTP, Satellite Link, and more
• Deploy in a matter of minutes by following a virtually plug-and-play process
• Easily scale to hundreds or thousands of branch offices and mobile workers
• Eliminate need to increase bandwidth capacity, reduce bandwidth utilization by 50 percent, and increase speed of application access by up to 90 percent
• Free up bandwidth for other applications, like VoIP or Citrix, so they can perform better
• Minimize the need for expensive WAN upgrades

Gain Visibility into IT Infrastructure

Enhance visibility into your infrastructure and analyze how IT resources are being used.

• Make meaningful changes that can affect performance and availability of automated systems like traffic surges or reductions, changes in application mix, and dependency changes
• Troubleshoot faster, unplanned changes in the network environment, misconfigurations, and unauthorized applications
• Detect and alerting to any threats across the entire infrastructure
• Develop appropriate security policies and resolve security incidents faster (with the Cascade ability to go beyond port level identification of network traffic)
• Enhance visibility into all key applications that cross the WAN. Quickly identify and resolve problems, eliminate pain points, validate that problems were resolved successfully, create global controls, and optimize applications for future business needs.
• Roll out new applications and upgrades quickly and efficiently. Achieve and prove compliance more easily.
• Provide senior management with information on the IT infrastructure that can help them make better business decisions that save money, resources, and efficiencies. Elevate the IT group from just providing a utility to contributing meaningfully to the business.
• Gain visibility and analytics to go well beyond simple reporting that confirms whether the infrastructure is up and running. True optimization-oriented visibility breaks down data into a deeper understanding into how applications are performing, analytics that set alerts when anomalous performance is detected, and details on which sites can benefit most from further optimization. This type of visibility can impact many different initiatives:
  • Determining the impact of application acceleration and WAN optimization
  • Analyzing future IT investments in relation to business priorities