Financial Services Companies Purchase and Deploy Riverbed's Steelhead Appliances; WDS Solutions Allow Global Collaboration, IT Consolidation and Improve Voice and Video Performance Over WANs

Business Wire, June 21, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO -- Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced today that Warburg Pincus LLC, and Greenhill & Co. have purchased and deployed Riverbed's Steelhead(R) wide-area data services (WDS) appliances to enable global collaboration and IT consolidation in their fast-paced, email- and document-intensive work environments. With globally integrated operations, these financial services organizations must have immediate access to data that impacts the financial health of corporations worldwide. Building fault-tolerant and high-performing IT environments is a critical part of that effort. Riverbed's Steelhead appliances allow these organizations to speed the performance of their applications over wide area networks (WANs) and consolidate IT infrastructure, which enables real-time collaboration, reduces costs, simplifies IT and helps to ensure the security of sensitive data.

Warburg Pincus is a 35-year old global private equity firm with offices in New York, London, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Menlo Park, California. The firm functions as one organization worldwide, with all of its professionals working together to evaluate potential investment opportunities. The Warburg Pincus philosophy has always been to align the interests of its internal professional staff, everywhere in the world, so that the accumulated knowledge and experience of the entire group can be harnessed on behalf of portfolio companies.

Currently Warburg has a loose federation of low bandwidth connections from branch offices to the home office. The company has partnered with Riverbed(R) as a solution to help improve the performance of applications over those low bandwidth connections, including email, documents, voice, and video. They saw WDS technology as the solution to these issues and have begun installing Riverbed's Steelhead appliances in each of their 10 offices worldwide.

"We are a Cisco shop," said Jeffrey Stein, VP and CIO at Warburg Pincus. "We chose Riverbed over the competition because it was able to deliver an easy-to-install and manage product that delivers the functionality that we need today. As we move closer to our strategy of centralizing IT infrastructure, we will look to the Steelhead appliances to enable us to move to fully centralized email, backup and restore, and file services. We also expect the Steelheads to help ensure the quality of our new voice and video infrastructure, while enabling us to control our bandwidth expense."

As Warburg Pincus centralizes its network and architecture as part of its global integration efforts, they are looking to Riverbed to enable higher performance connectivity with a lower cost of ownership than previously possible.

Greenhill & Co. is an independent global investment banking firm that provides services for mergers and acquisitions, financial restructuring, and merchant banking. The company is headquartered in New York, with offices in London, Frankfurt and Dallas, Texas. Greenhill's relatively small IT department sought to manage a complex and fast-growing environment, with heavy use of email and Windows applications. The complexity meant dealing with application performance issues, data sprawl, reliability issues, and data security challenges.

The Greenhill IT department deployed Riverbed's Steelhead appliances and was able to consolidate and simplify its IT infrastructure, moving its Exchange 2003 mail servers to a secure, high-availability colocation facility -- with no reduction in user performance. Email that took three-to-four minutes to download over the WAN prior to installation of the Steelhead appliances now takes just seconds.

"We are currently customers of Cisco, Juniper and F5, and carefully considered their offerings in the application and network acceleration space," said John Shaffer, director of IT at Greenhill. "We chose to go with Riverbed. They understand the problem and have built an easy-to-install and manage solution that addresses our two primary needs -- improving MAPI and CIFS performance over slow, latency-plagued connections."

In addition to allowing Greenhill to centralize infrastructure, the Steelhead appliance implementation enabled Greenhill to reduce both bandwidth and IT infrastructure costs.

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 file sharing, MAPI, Microsoft SQL and DPM, NetApp's SnapMirror, Symantec's NetBackup and FTP, while adding incremental application-specific latency optimizations to minimize the impact of latency on key applications.