Software development, like manufacturing, involves tremendous amounts of data. That data, combined with globalization, means that development teams that collaborate on a daily basis are often located on different continents. Modern source code management tools allow for "multi-site" development, but still, the code has to be replicated from one site to many others so that everyone is working from the same tree.

Riverbed WDS solutions allow the transmission of enormous files, even ones that are Gigabytes in size, in a fraction of the time it currently takes – all over your existing WAN. Now development teams have the choice of replicating source code or even having developers working on code in remote locations, with no performance or productivity loss.

A global software developer

One of Riverbed's customers, a major developer of application performance measurement tools, does much of their development in Israel. Their products involve collaborative work between teams separated by 10,000 miles, which means that sharing information can literally take hours. In many cases, it's literally faster to put an engineer on a plane with a few CDs and fly them to Israel, rather than wait for the FTP to complete and risk a transmission failure.

With Steelhead appliances, the time to transfer was reduced from hours to minutes. Not only did this result in much higher productivity, it meant that the company can collaborate in a much more real-time way, effectively shrinking the thousands of miles that separate their offices. It's almost as if the colleagues in Israel and Sunnyvale are in the same building.