HBOS Australia Banks on Riverbed to Accelerate Large Australian Expansion
Banking Giant Deploys Riverbed Steelhead Appliances at 170 Sites, Supporting Growth, Improving Agility and Cutting Costs to Improve Competitive Position Against the Largest Banks in Australia
San Francisco – June 2, 2008 – Riverbed Technology (Nasdaq: RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced that HBOS Australia has selected and deployed Riverbed® Steelhead® appliances at 170 sites across Australia. The deployment will improve application performance and is likely to reduce HBOS Australia's telecommunications costs, both vital components of the bank's ambitious expansion plans to open 160 new branches on the east coast of Australia over the next three years.
Riverbed Technology (Nasdaq: RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced that HBOS Australia has selected and deployed Riverbed® Steelhead® appliances at 170 sites across Australia. The deployment will improve application performance and is likely to reduce HBOS Australia's telecommunications costs, both vital components of the bank's ambitious expansion plans to open 160 new branches on the east coast of Australia over the next three years.
HBOS Australia has installed the Steelhead appliances in all of its existing branches across Australia, the majority of its state offices, and in its data centers in Perth. As the bank opens new branches, the rollout will continue, providing LAN-like application performance between branches on the east coast of Australia and the bank's west coast data centers.
HBOS Australia comprises four diverse financial services companies – BankWest, Capital Finance, St Andrew's and BOS International. Its parent company, HBOS plc, is one of the world's largest financial services groups. The retail arm of HBOS Australia, BankWest, was originally a Western Australian operation and is now expanding on the east coast of Australia.
Adrian Cowman, networks and telecommunications manager, IT infrastructure, HBOS Australia, says the Riverbed Steelhead products are an important factor in the bank's growth plans and have already allowed the company to accelerate the opening of new bank branches. Although the new branch infrastructure standard includes Cisco ISR routers and Cisco Voice over IP (VoIP) products, HBOS Australia chose Riverbed for its WAN acceleration solution.
"The Steelhead appliances, with their auto-configuration and centralised management capability, are incredibly easy to deploy, meaning we could roll out up to five branches each night," he explains. "Installing the products at more than 170 sites across the country took around 45 working days to complete, thanks largely to the simplicity of the products and their ability to integrate into a complex, multi-vendor IT environment. The Professional Services team from Riverbed, together with Dimension Data's technical expertise, helped make this one of the most successful, large-scale IT rollout projects the bank has undertaken."
Although HBOS Australia is deploying new applications such as VoIP, which demand high network quality, the Steelhead appliances have reduced WAN traffic and application performance has improved. In some instances, bandwidth usage has been reduced in BankWest branches.
"The new Riverbed RiOS® Services Platform (RSP) gives HBOS Australia the potential to embed future services, such as print servers, unified threat management and video streaming server functionality, into the existing Steelhead appliances," Mr. Cowman explains.
The RSP is an extensible data services platform that enables the delivery of virtualised edge services without the need to deploy additional physical servers at remote or branch offices. The game-changing RSP allows customers to deploy best-of-breed services from their choice of vendors on Steelhead appliances in a self-contained partition to minimise the hardware infrastructure footprint at the branch office. In a typical RSP deployment, companies can run "serverless" branch offices by simplifying IT infrastructure to include just a router and a Steelhead appliance.
Mr. Cowman said the company's expansion on the east coast meant HBOS Australia had to find a solution that was scalable and easy to deploy and manage for its 170 sites to accelerate the performance of applications across its WAN.
"Business agility demands reliable communication among offices and the ability to quickly and easily share information," he says. "When we simulated the new standard branch IT environment, we realised we had to find a solution to accelerate application performance and minimise bandwidth usage. We considered other vendors but, after extensive multi-vendor testing, concluded that Riverbed products were robust, secure and the easiest to implement with a high probability of success across our large network of 170 offices – all key factors for a large and distributed organisation in the banking sector."
"We determined that Riverbed was the only vendor with a technology that could meet the requirements of our large deployment. The fact that Riverbed is the recognised global market leader in this field was also important for us as we are a risk-averse organisation."
HBOS Australia is also now testing the Riverbed Steelhead Mobile client software to support its large mobile workforce, as well as additional high-end Steelhead appliance platforms to assist with disaster recovery in its data centres.
Steve Dixon, regional director, Australia/New Zealand at Riverbed, says WDS technology allows organisations to be more nimble in their approach to IT and infrastructure, improving competitiveness and delivering better customer service levels.
"If organizations can do more with their existing network, they immediately have an advantage," he says. "Costs are reduced, allowing companies to invest back into the business to support growth and new opportunities. At the same time, bandwidth can be reallocated to real-time applications such as IP telephony and streaming media, improving organisations' productivity and, in turn, their competitiveness."
Steelhead Products
Riverbed 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 April 29, 2008. 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
