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Riverbed Technology: Staging Connections Group Records Three-Month ROI With Riverbed

^{Published on 2009-08-25 06:20:42, Last Modified on 2009-08-25 06:20:43 - Market Wire}
 

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - August 25, 2009) - Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: [ RVBD ]), the IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications and storage, today announced that Staging Connections Group Limited (SCGL), Asia Pacific's premier event staging services company, has deployed Riverbed® Steelhead® appliances at its 11 national Staging Connections offices. As a result, the company has quadrupled its application performance, reduced its data replication times, and recorded a return on investment of less than three months by avoiding expensive bandwidth upgrades.

SCGL's core business, Staging Connections, has been managing large-scale events in Australia for more than 20 years, and today employs in excess of 750 staff across the Asia Pacific region. SCGL has established a strong presence from Australia and New Zealand to Fiji, China, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. In Australia it operates a network of 11 primary offices and more than 70 remote offices, mainly in premium five-star hotels and resorts.

SCGL's Chief Information Officer, Phil Gardner, was selected to lead an IT infrastructure centralization project that included re-implementing the company's ERP system, establishing the operational systems, and rolling them all up into a centralized platform -- with a goal of significantly reducing IT costs within 12 months. To meet these goals without impacting end user performance, Gardner researched WAN optimization solutions.

"We immediately launched a technical evaluation of Riverbed, Expand and Juniper to find the best balance of bandwidth optimization, traffic acceleration, backup and Exchange support for the project," says Gardner. Based on successful testing, SCGL selected Riverbed as its WAN optimization provider.

"Riverbed impressed us with the simplicity of the Steelhead appliances. We could literally ship one down to a remote office, plug it in, and have it auto-configure on the network. Riverbed also allowed us to trial the appliances before committing, and we practically installed them ourselves with only minor referrals to the excellent support team behind the products," says Gardner.

Since deploying Riverbed WAN optimization, SCGL has improved application response times and file transfers over the WAN by more than 400 percent, and reduced its data replication times by 78 percent. Within three months of deployment, the Steelhead appliances paid for themselves as a result of Staging Connections no longer needing to upgrade its network bandwidth or replace its file and print servers on the WAN.

Gardner also cites disaster recovery (DR) backups from SCGL's Sydney data centre to its Melbourne server room as an example of how the Steelhead appliances can prove their worth. In a recent trial, SCGL was able to transfer the full load of up to eight gigabytes of data overnight between two primary sites across a 6MB link. As a result, SCGL's DR capacity was more than tripled -- its 6MB link performed like a 20MB link. This will allow the company to reduce its CAPEX in 2010, since it will no longer need a separate link to its DR site once the optimized link goes live in the next six months.

"Like many companies in Australia, we were looking to server consolidation and centralization to cut costs and improve return on investment, and couldn't afford to just double or quadruple our bandwidth," says Gardner. "Based on our experience, it's understandable why organisations would look to Riverbed to maximise the value of their existing IT infrastructure."

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed's products and services, statements regarding performance results of Riverbed solutions and customer payback following implementation of Riverbed solutions that may suggest likely or certain outcomes, 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 July 30, 2009. 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.

About Riverbed

Riverbed Technology is the IT infrastructure performance company. The Riverbed family of wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions liberates businesses from common IT constraints by increasing application performance, enabling consolidation, and providing enterprise-wide network and application visibility -- all while eliminating the need to increase bandwidth, storage or servers. Thousands of companies with distributed operations use Riverbed to make their IT infrastructure faster, less expensive and more responsive. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: [ RVBD ]) is available at [ www.riverbed.com ].

Riverbed Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead, RiOS, Interceptor, Think Fast, the Riverbed logo, Mazu, Profiler and Cascade are trademarks or registered trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.