Investor AB Selects Riverbed Technology to Enable Global IT Infrastructure Consolidation; Deployment of Steelhead Appliances Ensures Optimal User Performance; Improves Backup and Data Protection

Business Wire, Oct 10, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO -- Riverbed Technology, the performance leader in application acceleration on wide area networks, today announced that Investor AB (Investor), the largest industrial holding company in the Nordic region, has selected Riverbed's Steelhead(R) appliances to enable consolidation of its global IT infrastructure. Investor's consolidation effort is a multi-phase project that includes deployment of Riverbed's Steelhead appliances in offices in Stockholm, Amsterdam, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Palo Alto, California.

Investor is a leading shareholder in a number of multi-national companies, including AstraZeneca, Ericsson and SEB. Investor also conducts private equity activities in North America, Europe and Asia. Before Riverbed, every Investor office required a significant investment in IT infrastructure such as Microsoft Exchange servers, file servers and tape backup equipment. Investor's offices are connected through a T1 or E1 to a global MPLS network. To date, Investor has deployed Steelhead appliances in its Stockholm, Amsterdam and New York offices.

"We faced the daunting challenge of managing an expensive, widely-distributed IT infrastructure and needed to consolidate to reduce IT costs and management overhead," said Fredrik Kenmo, senior systems engineer at Investor. "At the same time, the need for LAN-like performance in every office dramatically increased the complexity of application roll-outs, upgrades, and security enforcement across the company. Riverbed enabled us to balance these competing requirements, allowing us to move forward with our initiative to centralize our IT infrastructure, while ensuring application performance in remote sites."

In addition to ensuring the performance of a centralized IT architecture, Investor chose Riverbed for other key projects, including:

--Centralizing key infrastructure components such as mail, file, and application services

--Leveraging its recently deployed MPLS WAN

--Improving backup and data protection policies

Investor initially deployed Steelhead appliances in its Stockholm and Amsterdam offices in May of 2005.

"I was very surprised by how simple the deployment was," said Kenmo. "I expected a complex integration, but it only required that I give each appliance an IP address. It was only a matter of minutes before I had the boxes up and running."

After the deployment, Kenmo tested the new appliances by moving his home directories and his Exchange 2003 mailbox from his home office servers in Stockholm to Investor's site in Amsterdam.

"Even after moving my mailbox and home directory, the performance is virtually like being on the LAN," said Kenmo. "I know that Riverbed claims that kind of performance, but to see it was quite amazing. I wouldn't have ever tried centralizing those servers before, but now I see it can be done."

Riverbed's Steelhead appliance is the only WDS product on the market that solves all the key problems with application performance on wide area networks (WANs). These problems have been or are currently experienced by virtually every multi-site company in the world. The company's Steelhead appliances deliver the industry's best network compression, optimize the behavior of TCP, and add application-specific optimizations to minimize the effect of high latency on common enterprise applications.

About Riverbed Technology

Riverbed Technology is the pioneer in wide-area data services (WDS), a fast-growing product category that solves the problems of high latency and low bandwidth that plague a wide variety of applications over distributed networks. Riverbed's Steelhead appliances provide the highest level of performance across the broadest range of applications over WANs, accelerating applications by up to 100 times, and reducing WAN traffic by up to 95%. By providing optimizations that are orders of magnitude greater than what users experience today, Riverbed is changing the way people work -- and enabling, for the first time, a distributed workforce that can collaborate as if they were local. InfoWorld named Steelhead a "Product of the Year" for 2005 as the "Best WAN Accelerator." Riverbed's award-winning solutions are available worldwide from resellers who are members of the Riverbed Partner Network, Riverbed OEM partners, or directly from Riverbed. Riverbed has received funding from Accel Partners, Goldman Sachs, Lightspeed Venture Partners and UV Partners.

Riverbed Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead 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.