Riverbed Improves Collaboration and Productivity for Leading Construction Firm
Acceleration of Centralized Applications Improves User Productivity and Satisfaction While Delivering Cost Savings and Greater Bandwidth Utilization
San Francisco – February 4, 2008 – Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced that Colas Ltd, a UK-based subsidiary of Colas SA, the world's leading road construction and maintenance Group, has standardized on Riverbed's Steelhead® appliances for application acceleration across its UK corporate network. In addition to improving collaboration between its offices, the speed delivered by Riverbed's WDS solutions has allowed Colas to reduce costs and improve its disaster recovery processes.
Colas Ltd operates throughout Great Britain as a service provider to the highways and airfields sectors. As part of the international Colas Group, Colas Ltd shares the knowledge and resources of one of the world's leading road construction and maintenance organizations. It has more than 20 offices and depots throughout Great Britain.
Colas Ltd had centralized its IT infrastructure and sought faster access to its centralized applications and files by employees at remote sites. Poor performance over the company's wide area network (WAN) was hindering the performance of Microsoft Office and in-house database applications, whilst limiting the ability of employees to collaborate and share knowledge. At the same time, Colas wanted to make improvements to its disaster recovery backup process, and install new applications from Microsoft, such as its SharePoint Server and CRM, which required an effective centralized network.
The company decided to look for a way to improve the performance of its network. It began by considering thin client technology from Citrix to tackle the performance problems when accessing Microsoft applications, before looking at Riverbed® to provide a more complete solution.
Tony Delaney, IT manager at Colas Ltd, comments on the vendor decision, "The benefit of Riverbed's Steelhead appliances was that in addition to addressing the specific Microsoft application performance issues, they could also optimize the bandwidth on the network in its entirety. We felt this offered a far better return on investment (ROI) than implementing a Citrix solution or embarking on a costly upgrade of our network bandwidth."
By working with Riverbed reseller Kisdata, and installing the Riverbed Steelhead appliances, Colas avoided costly bandwidth upgrades, saving an expected £110,000 over the next two years. The access of centralized applications and files is now eight times faster, while IT managers have recognized a 65 to 75 percent reduction in bandwidth utilization, with the Colas backup window being reduced from five hours to one.
"For our end users, the experience of accessing and using applications was painfully slow – so much so, that centralization was more of a hindrance than an enabler," said Delaney. "We needed to accelerate the speed at which people could access centralized systems in order to share knowledge and information more effectively. Installing the Riverbed solution has definitely made the business more productive, and people no longer talk about our network in a negative way," commented Delaney.
"Given the industry we operate in, we have a lot of workers connecting to our centralized systems remotely. Moving forward we are currently looking at Riverbed acceleration technology for our mobile workers. Such a product would be a crucial element to Colas' future IT network plans, as company knowledge would become truly accessible to all employees, regardless of location," said Delaney.
About Colas
Colas Ltd is a UK-based subsidiary of Colas SA, the world's leading road construction and maintenance group headquartered in France. Colas SA operates in more than 40 countries and posted turnover of €10.7 billion in 2006. The UK company, Colas Ltd, is headquartered at Rowfant in West Sussex and specializes in airfield and highway construction. Colas Ltd employs over 1,200 people.
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:
Kristalle Ward
Riverbed Technology
415-247-8140
kristalle.ward@riverbed.com
Robb Henshaw
Horn Group for Riverbed Technology
415-905-4028
rhenshaw@horngroup.com
