SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: 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.
Connect with Riverbed
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.
