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Riverbed WAN Acceleration Improves Collaboration and Productivity for Leading Construction Firm

February 4th, 2008 by Tredent

Acceleration of Centralized Applications Improves User Productivity and Satisfaction While Delivering Cost Savings and Greater WAN Bandwidth Utilization

Riverbed Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced that Colas Ltd, a UK-based subsidiary of Colas SA, the world’s leading road construction and maintenance Group, has standardized on Riverbed’s Steelhead(R) appliances for application acceleration across its UK corporate network. In addition to improving collaboration between its offices, the speed delivered by Riverbed’s WDS solutions has allowed Colas to reduce costs and improve its disaster recovery processes.Colas Ltd operates throughout Great Britain as a service provider to the highways and airfields sectors. As part of the international Colas Group, Colas Ltd shares the knowledge and resources of one of the world’s leading road construction and maintenance organizations. It has more than 20 offices and depots throughout Great Britain.

Colas Ltd had centralized its IT infrastructure and sought faster access to its centralized applications and files by employees at remote sites. Poor performance over the company’s wide area network (WAN) was hindering the performance of Microsoft Office and in-house database applications, whilst limiting the ability of employees to collaborate and share knowledge. At the same time, Colas wanted to make improvements to its disaster recovery backup process, and install new applications from Microsoft, such as its SharePoint Server and CRM, which required an effective centralized network.

The company decided to look for a way to improve the performance of its network. It began by considering thin client technology from Citrix to tackle the performance problems when accessing Microsoft applications, before looking at Riverbed WAN optimization to provide a more complete solution.

Tony Delaney, IT manager at Colas Ltd, comments on the vendor decision, “The benefit of Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances was that in addition to addressing the specific Microsoft application performance issues, they could also optimize the bandwidth on the network in its entirety. We felt this offered a far better return on investment (ROI) than implementing a Citrix solution or embarking on a costly upgrade of our network bandwidth.”

By working with Riverbed reseller Kisdata, and installing the Riverbed Steelhead appliances, Colas avoided costly bandwidth upgrades, saving an expected GBP 110,000 over the next two years. The access of centralized applications and files is now eight times faster, while IT managers have recognized a 65 to 75 percent reduction in bandwidth utilization, with the Colas backup window being reduced from five hours to one.

“For our end users, the experience of accessing and using applications was painfully slow — so much so, that centralization was more of a hindrance than an enabler,” said Delaney. “We needed to accelerate the speed at which people could access centralized systems in order to share knowledge and information more effectively. Installing the Riverbed solution has definitely made the business more productive, and people no longer talk about our network in a negative way,” commented Delaney.

“Given the industry we operate in, we have a lot of workers connecting to our centralized systems remotely. Moving forward we are currently looking at Riverbed acceleration technology for our mobile workers. Such a product would be a crucial element to Colas’ future IT network plans, as company knowledge would become truly accessible to all employees, regardless of location,” said Delaney.

About Colas

Colas Ltd is a UK-based subsidiary of Colas SA, the world’s leading road construction and maintenance group headquartered in France. Colas SA operates in more than 40 countries and posted turnover of EUR 10.7 billion in 2006. The UK company, Colas Ltd, is headquartered at Rowfant in West Sussex and specializes in airfield and highway construction. Colas Ltd employs over 1,200 people.