San Francisco, CA — July 11, 2006 — Riverbed Technology, Inc. today announced that Lagan Construction, an international construction and building business, has installed Riverbed’s Steelhead® appliances to improve the performance of its business critical applications over the WAN, to provide accelerated back-up and centralize IT support.

Lagan has purchased 18 Steelhead appliances and has deployed them at the company’s head office in Belfast and at 17 remote sites, including Luton Airport, Puerto Rico and locations across Ireland. The deal was organized through Riverbed’s reseller in Ireland 4sol.

Having accurate real-time project data is essential to Lagan for global work-force collaboration and the effective management of the work carried out by the company. As such, Lagan wanted to implement Microsoft SharePoint and have remote site access to applications over a wide area network (WAN).

Lagan installed SharePoint and learned quickly that accessing it over the WAN was too slow for effective use. In addition, Lagan planned to consolidate its IT support and needed to decrease the time it spent backing-up remote-site data over the network. To solve these issues, Lagan approached Riverbed® for a solution that would speed application performance over the WAN, while reducing backup times and enabling the consolidation of IT infrastructure. In addition, because Lagan work-sites are temporary, they must be IT-enabled quickly, with the head office managing site infrastructure using minimal local specialists. The solution would need to be easy to manage and install with minimal IT support.

After the initial trial period, Lagan determined the increased application performance allowed remote employees to work effectively at the site locations as never before. It is now practical for project managers to log-on from Steelhead appliance-enabled locations throughout Ireland and in Puerto Rico to review work at any Steelhead appliance-enabled site, helping improve collaboration and tighten management controls.

“Our business is akin to establishing a series of temporary, multi-million British Pound manufacturing plants from scratch, at a series of worldwide remote locations,” said David Jeffs, joint managing director of Lagan Construction. “Steelhead appliances enable us to simplify installation because there is no need to install local servers and other IT infrastructure. When we first trialled the Steelhead appliance, it took just ten minutes to set up and we could immediately see what a difference it was making to the performance of applications on the network, particularly the SharePoint application.”

In addition to enabling SharePoint to operate at LAN-like speeds and allowing reliable backups to the central office to be made, installing the Steelhead appliances meant Lagan’s four-man IT team could maintain and support its remote IT sites from its office in Belfast. “We predict that this will substantially cut our IT outsourcing and bandwidth upgrade costs,” said David Jeffs, at Lagan Construction.

Riverbed’s award-winning Steelhead appliances accelerate enterprise applications typically by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times between enterprise datacenters and remote offices. The Steelhead appliance’s intelligent optimizations give companies that share data and collaborate between distributed offices significant performance improvements for a broad range of applications that are important to their businesses, offering these companies the ability to simplify IT infrastructure and realize significant capital and operational cost savings.

Unlike competing approaches that are built primarily on either a network-compression or storage (caching) philosophy (like many WAFS-only architectures), Steelhead appliances are based on the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS™), which accelerates all TCP-based applications, including common applications like Windows® file sharing, MAPI, Microsoft SQL and DPM, NetApp® SnapMirror®, Symantec™ NetBackup and FTP, while adding incremental application-specific latency optimizations to minimize the impact of latency on key applications.

Riverbed’s intelligent optimizations also enable remote office IT consolidation, WAN bandwidth optimization and acceleration of data replication and backup for disaster recovery.

Riverbed Technology is the performance leader in wide-area data services (WDS) solutions. 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. Riverbed’s Steelhead appliance has been named InfoWorld’s "Technology of the Year" in both 2005 and 2006 as the "Best WAN Accelerator". In addition, Riverbed was named the winner of The Wall Street Journal’s 2005 Technology Innovation Award in the Network/ Broadband/Internet category, Network Computing’s 2006 Well-Connected Award for Remote Office Network Infrastructure, and eWeek’s 2006 Excellence Award for Networking Infrastructure. Riverbed's award-winning solutions are available worldwide from resellers who are members of the Riverbed Partner Network, from Riverbed OEM partners, or directly from Riverbed.

Riverbed Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead, RiOS 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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For more information, visit www.riverbed.com.

Media Contact:

Kim Kapustka
(415) 344 4476
kim@riverbed.com

 

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