Benefits: LAN-like speeds from home
With Riverbed Client Accelerator, Landform teams working over home internet connections produce the same quality of work at the same pace they do in the office. “The best compliment I’ve heard is, ‘It’s just like working in the office,’” says Walgren.
No loss of productivity, for rapid payback. Faster file access saves each employee from 20 minutes to 2-3 hours daily. The larger the file, the more time saved. Say a land-development project has five team members with an average billing rate of $200/hour. If Riverbed Client Accelerator saves each person one hour a day (as it would if they each opened three large or five medium files), Landform avoids $1,000 a day in lost productivity. That’s $5,000 a week or $250,000 a year—the equivalent of 1-2 full-time employees. Riverbed Client Accelerator paid for itself in less than a month.
Efficient team collaboration on large files. By accelerating access to files on office servers, Riverbed Client Accelerator eliminates the temptation to save files locally, avoiding lost work if two people work concurrently on the same drawing. Fast opens and saves also enable rich collaboration during team meetings. “Say we’re in a Microsoft Teams meeting and everyone has an AutoCAD Civil 3D file open,” says Walgren. “If a designer asks someone to move a lot line 10 feet to the left, the other people can see the change almost instantaneously. Real-time collaboration on drawings from home is a game changer.”
Competitive advantage. Unlike many companies in the industry, Landform didn’t furlough any staff during the pandemic—and, in fact, is hiring. The firm won contracts for two large projects in the first few months of the stay-at-home order. “Organizations looking for site design services want to know the partner firm can continue working even if there’s another lockdown,” Walgren says. “We’ve shown we can do our best work whatever the future brings—whether we’re all back in the office, all at home, or a mix. Riverbed Client Accelerator is a big part of that.”
Simple IT. The Riverbed solution doesn’t add work for IT. Files remained in Landform’s data center, so backup processes didn’t have to change. CSG deployed Riverbed Mobile Controller as a virtual machine on its own infrastructure so that Landform didn’t even need storage space.