Avanade(R) Selects Riverbed Steelhead WDS Appliances to Accelerate SharePoint(R) and Exchange Performance.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced today that Avanade, a leading technology integrator specializing in the Microsoft(R) enterprise platform, has selected and deployed Riverbed's Steelhead(R) wide-area data services (WDS) appliances to improve the performance of its applications, including Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange Server, over the wide area network (WAN), and enable centralization of its IT infrastructure.

Avanade is a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft with more than 4,000 professionals located in 21 countries. The company helps Global 2000 customers maximize their IT investments and creates value for its customers by designing, developing, and delivering customized solutions that drive business results.

As a consulting company, Avanade's work is highly collaborative. Employees share files and need to work together in real-time to be successful in their work. The company was looking for a solution that would empower their employees by allowing them to quickly and efficiently get to the data they need, regardless of location. At the same time, Avanade planned to further centralize its IT infrastructure in order to reduce both the cost and complexity inherent in a distributed architecture. Reconciling these two goals was a major challenge.

Avanade relies heavily on Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange as its collaboration platforms. Its SharePoint deployment was centralized in the US data center, while users accessed their Microsoft Exchange data from regional data centers. Avanade sought to improve the performance of both applications, especially its SharePoint performance in Asia-Pacific and Europe.

"Further distributing our IT infrastructure would give employees easy access to their data, but would actually make collaboration across the world more difficult. Additionally, that approach would introduce much more cost and operational overhead and complexity, moving the company away from its plan of IT centralization and making this strategy untenable," noted Craig Nelson, director of IT Architecture at Avanade. Instead, Avanade turned to Riverbed(R) to reconcile the competing goals of fast, efficient application access and centralized IT infrastructure.

Avanade has regional data centers in Singapore, London and Seattle, Washington. Steelhead appliances have been installed at each of these sites and at remote locations worldwide. Today, users in remote locations access data by dialing into their regional data center that redirects the traffic back to the data center in Seattle.

"Since installing the Steelhead appliances, we've centralized our Exchange servers without telling anyone and no one can tell the difference," said Nelson. "Furthermore, the performance of SharePoint over the WAN has improved so much that we don't need to deploy multiple application servers around the world. We now have the best of both worlds. We have the high-performance normally associated with a distributed architecture and the cost and operational benefits of centralized IT."

With the Steelhead appliances installed, traffic going across Avanade's WAN connections has dropped by an average of 82%, while performance has gone up by ten to 13X.

About Steelhead Appliances

Riverbed's award-winning Steelhead appliances accelerate enterprise applications typically by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times between enterprise datacenters and remote offices. The Steelhead appliance's intelligent optimizations give companies that share data and collaborate between distributed offices significant performance improvements for a broad range of applications that are important to their businesses, offering these companies the ability to simplify IT infrastructure and realize significant capital and operational cost savings.

Unlike competing approaches that are built primarily on either a network-compression or storage (caching) philosophy (like many WAFS-only architectures), Steelhead appliances are based on the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS(TM)), which accelerates all TCP-based applications, including common applications like Windows(R) file sharing, MAPI, Microsoft SQL and DPM, NetApp(R) SnapMirror(R), Symantec(TM) NetBackup and FTP, while adding incremental application-specific latency optimizations to minimize the impact of latency on key applications.

Riverbed's intelligent optimizations also enable remote office IT consolidation, WAN bandwidth optimization and acceleration of data replication and backup for disaster recovery.

About Riverbed

Riverbed Technology, Inc. is the performance leader in wide-area data services (WDS) solutions. By enabling application performance over the wide area network (WAN) that is orders of magnitude faster than what users experience today, Riverbed is changing the way people work, and enabling a distributed workforce that can collaborate as if they were local. The Wall Street Journal named Riverbed the winner of its 2005 Technology Innovation Award in the Network/Broadband/Internet category. In addition, InfoWorld has named Riverbed's Steelhead appliance "Technology of the Year" in both 2005 and 2006, as the "Best WAN Accelerator," and Network Computing named Riverbed the winner of its 2006 Well-Connected Award for "Remote Office Network Infrastructure." Riverbed's award-winning solutions are available worldwide from resellers who are members of the Riverbed Partner Network, from Riverbed OEM partners, or directly from Riverbed. For more information about Riverbed, visit www.riverbed.com.

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