LG Electronics Deploys Riverbed's Steelhead Appliances across Global Network; Reduces Annual Bandwidth Expenditure by $6 Million while Accelerating Application Performance over the WAN by Up to 20X

Business Wire, August 2, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO -- Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced today that LG Electronics has selected and deployed Riverbed's wide-area data services (WDS) Steelhead(R) appliances at several dozen sites in countries around the world to accelerate application performance over its globally distributed wide area network (WAN) and control bandwidth costs.

LG Electronics was established in the 1950s as the pioneer in the Korean consumer electronics market. The company is now a global force in electronics, information and communications products with 2004 annual sales of US $38 billion. LG Electronics is comprised of four main businesses: Mobile, Digital Appliance, Display and Media.

With more than 100 offices outside its headquarters, LG Electronics has a massive investment in bandwidth and infrastructure, including expensive international connectivity that is marked by higher latency than intra-Korea bandwidth. Prior to the installation of Riverbed's Steelhead appliances, the LG Electronics network was being stretched to capacity. The company was experiencing increased usage across all locations and all applications and a significant increase in the number of internal applications requiring network access, including many custom applications. In addition, several internal applications could not be accessed by employees in remote offices because application performance was so slow. For example, the LG Electronics purchase/sales/inventory application could not be accessed from the Vladivostok office.

LG Electronics needed a solution that would overcome both the limitations created by bandwidth expense and the impact of latency on application performance. In addition, the solution needed to integrate and operate well with LG Electronics' heterogeneous, complex infrastructure, including equipment from Cisco, Nortel and 3Com. The company turned to WDS solutions providers for the answer.

LG Electronics' project leader considered products from Expand Networks, Peribit (now part of Juniper Networks) and Riverbed, and performed extensive tests on Expand Networks' products, as well as Riverbed's Steelhead appliances.

"The Steelhead appliances performed better than the competition," said Mr. Kang-Seok Chung, senior manager, IT Infrastructure Group at LG Electronics. "They produced the fastest response times for the offerings tested and they supported more of our critical protocols. Riverbed(R) also did a better job of reducing WAN traffic. Finally, the Steelhead appliances were the easiest to manage, which is a critical component to a successful global deployment as large as ours."

LG Electronics also saw significant bandwidth savings that delivered a payback period of five months.

"Bandwidth is not cheap for international companies, especially in the Asia Pacific region," continued Mr. Chung. "But immediately after deploying the Steelhead appliances, we saw a reduction in bandwidth utilization of 40% in critical parts of our global network. With Riverbed, we have reduced our bandwidth cost significantly, while creating faster access times for our remote employees."

After deploying the Steelhead appliances, LG Electronics' critical applications experienced immediate and significant performance results. For example, remote employees accessing eNet, the company's centralized Lotus-based intranet, enjoy performance that is up to 20 times faster than before. In addition, the purchase/sales/inventory application that could not be accessed from the Vladivostok office previously can now be accessed in just a few seconds, dramatically improving productivity for the remote office.

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 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. Riverbed's Steelhead appliance has been named InfoWorld's "Technology of the Year" in both 2005 and 2006 as the "Best WAN Accelerator". In addition, Riverbed was named the winner of The Wall Street Journal's 2005 Technology Innovation Award in the Network/Broadband/Internet category, Network Computing's 2006 Well-Connected Award for Remote Office Network Infrastructure, and eWeek's 2006 Excellence Award for Networking 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, visit www.riverbed.com.