Riverbed SteelHead and SteelHead Mobile Allow JEO Consulting Group to Work Efficiently from Anywhere

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Riverbed Technology RVBD, the leader in application performance infrastructure, today announced that JEO Consulting Group is using Riverbed® SteelHead™ and SteelHead™ Mobile to improve client satisfaction by enabling its employees to work efficiently from anywhere. By fostering inter-office collaboration and dramatically shrinking the time needed to download large project files, Riverbed is allowing JEO's employees to work more productively and closer to clients, which helps ensure projects are completed on time. Another benefit of the SteelHead solution is that the firm can locate offices in small towns where it wants to have a presence, while always ensuring superior application performance, regardless of network topology constraints and distance from application sources.

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JEO Consulting Group Inc., based in Wahoo, Nebraska, provides engineering, architectural, planning, and surveying services. The firm's employees provide services to clients throughout the Midwest.

JEO relies on a hybrid network – a mix of MPLS and Internet WAN circuits – to deliver centralized, business-critical applications, such as computer-aided design (CAD), geographic information systems (GIS) and financial software to its 10 offices, and also to enable inter-office collaboration.

The initial experience of using the wide area network (WAN) for these purposes had limited success, however. Part of the problem was that some of the firm's offices are in such small towns and have so few employees that it was cost-prohibitive to equip those offices with sufficient bandwidth for handling large files, while relying on the public Internet wasn't an option for this type of work. Another challenge was that the firm's workforce is highly mobile. "Planners can be at a customer site or on a project, executives are always on the road, and many engineers want to work from home," explained Travis Klasna, JEO's IT manager during the application centralization project. "But trying to remotely download a set of project files and CAD drawings could take 60 minutes or more."

To address this issue and improve end-user productivity, JEO deployed SteelHead in its data center and offices, and SteelHead Mobile software on the laptops of employees. SteelHead brings centralized, application-driven control of hybrid networks with "business intent"-based policies that make it easy to configure and manage path selection, quality of service (QoS), and secure transport. Using Path Selection, JEO can intelligently direct applications over the most appropriate network path based on business needs, moving critical applications over the fastest networks, while less critical applications are sent over the Internet. Across the company everyone has seen an improvement in data access times and application performance. "From the perspective of end users, I would consider app performance to be excellent," said Patrick Dix, JEO's current IT manager, who explained that even users in the towns with limited network connections no longer have trouble opening large CAD and GIS files.

In a typical example, it took 60 minutes for one employee to download a 110-megabyte project folder on a home DSL connection prior to having SteelHead Mobile on his laptop. With SteelHead Mobile, the transfer took only 1.5 minutes – a performance gain of 40x. In addition, mobile users are seeing as much as 75% less data going over their Internet connections.

Client satisfaction is the benchmark by which JEO measures its success, and more than 80% of the firm's projects are repeat business. Because an important part of client satisfaction involves delivering on time, the SteelHead solutions are contributing to client satisfaction by improving the productivity of JEO's employees. "By optimizing complex network traffic, SteelHead technology definitely plays a part in making us work more efficiently," said Dix.

With SteelHead, JEO can have offices and its employees located wherever the business need arises. Employees in these locations have close to the same level of application performance they would get in the headquarters. "The standard is that they're able to work just as if they were in one of the larger offices that has 100-megabit fiber to the data center," Dix noted. "SteelHead allows us to have power users in these small offices. We can put in SteelHead and get the benefits without the recurring bandwidth costs."

Klasna summed up the firm's experience with Riverbed: "Overall, Riverbed has managed to deliver both local-like performance to my end users, no matter where they are, while making it easy for me to manage the whole system. That's a winning combination."

Riverbed SteelHead and the Riverbed Application Performance Platform™

The Riverbed Application Performance Platform™ gives CIOs unparalleled visibility to deliver, control, and optimize all IT resources across the hybrid enterprise. A key part of the platform, Riverbed SteelHead is the industry's #1 optimization solution for accelerated delivery of all applications across the hybrid enterprise. SteelHead provides increased visibility into application performance and end-user experience and the ability to ensure business performance SLAs through an application-aware approach to hybrid networking based on centralized business intent-based policies.

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About Riverbed

Riverbed, at more than $1 billion in annual revenue, is the leader in Application Performance Infrastructure, delivering the most complete platform for the hybrid enterprise to ensure applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed, and performance issues can be proactively detected and resolved before impacting business performance. Riverbed enables hybrid enterprises to transform application performance into a competitive advantage by maximizing employee productivity and leveraging IT to create new forms of operational agility. Riverbed's 26,000+ customers include 97% of the Fortune 100 and 98% of the Forbes Global 100. Learn more at www.riverbed.com.

Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logo used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners.