SAN FRANCISCO – April 5, 2010 —– Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the IT performance company, today announced the deployment of Riverbed® Steelhead® appliances at Federal Heath Sign Company offices across the United States and in Federal Heath’s data center located in Willow Brook, IL. As a result of its Riverbed WAN optimization deployment, Federal Heath has increased bandwidth capacity by 3x and reduced data traffic by as much as 98 percent during peak periods, resulting in increased application performance over the WAN.  With WAN optimization, Federal Heath has improved employee productivity and collaboration, leading to faster customer service.

“We selected Riverbed Steelhead appliances for their ability to increase the performance of our centralized systems.  We now receive unsolicited feedback from employees on how effective the system is in providing faster customer service– a huge improvement from the complaints we were receiving previously,” said Greg Katsaros, IT manager at Federal Heath.  “In addition, the Steelhead appliances are easy to deploy into our network and we don’t have to constantly spend time administering them. We now have a happy IT staff, productive employees and satisfied customers.”

Federal Heath provides electric signage, canopy and fascia products, commercial remodeling, nationwide conversions and maintenance services. The company has 450 employees in four manufacturing facilities -- located in Oceanside, CA; Delaware, OH; Euless, TX; and Jacksonville, TX -- and over 20 sales and maintenance offices throughout the U.S.  Federal Heath is a 100 year old company that has been involved in several mergers and acquisitions over the years.  As the company integrated operational processes with each merger, the IT team determined that each office and each employee had a different approach to saving critical customer data, which made it difficult to maintain a centralized document management process. The company needed a company-wide system that allowed employees to retrieve accurate customer information quickly, including survey photos, design and engineering drawings, email correspondence, site contracts and legal documents.  

Along the way Federal Heath launched its “Lean Concept” initiative, which encouraged departments to eliminate waste and unnecessary steps.  To support the corporate initiative and create a more collaborative environment between its dispersed offices, the three-person IT staff developed a proprietary customer status system (CSS), a project management system that allows salespeople, project managers, designers and estimators, manufacturing plants and customers to exchange information internally over the corporate network or externally over the Web. Orders range from custom signage and corporate IDs to signs for Bed, Bath and Beyond, Chevron, Chili’s, CNN, Countrywide, Harrahs, Volvo and Target.    

“Prior to the development of the CSS, our customer service had been impacted by our inability to quickly access the most accurate information on each client and the resulting difficulty in finding historical information,” said Katsaros. “This made our employees have to perform extra work to recreate design specs and notes that already existed.”

The CSS solved the version control issues but forced bandwidth usage to skyrocket as the company’s use of large files, including AutoCAD and Corel files, PDFs and high-resolution graphics, which can be more than 20 MB in size in some cases, resulted in delays when accessing data from its central data center. As Federal Heath began looking for a solution, Katsaros decided against adding bandwidth, as it was cost-prohibitive and also wouldn’t solve the latency issue. Since the company also had a small IT staff, it needed a solution that was easy to deploy and didn’t require much maintenance once installed.

The Federal Heath IT team decided to deploy WAN optimization technology and selected Riverbed for its ease-of-deployment and simplicity, leading to the deployment of Steelhead appliances.  With Riverbed WAN optimization, Federal Heath increased its bandwidth capacity by 3x and reduced data traffic by as much as 98 percent during peak periods.   The implementation of WAN optimization helped the company continue to build on its “Lean Concept” initiative to eliminate waste and unnecessary steps.

Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed's products and services, statements regarding performance results of Riverbed solutions that may suggest likely or certain outcomes, and statements relating to Riverbed’s ability to meet the needs of distributed organizations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions, that, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission.  More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed’s business are set forth in our Form 10-K filed with the SEC on February 12, 2010.  All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements.  Any future product, feature or related specification that may be referenced in this release are for information purposes only and are not commitments to deliver any technology or enhancement. Riverbed reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time.

About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the IT performance company. The Riverbed family of wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions liberates businesses from common IT constraints by increasing application performance, enabling consolidation, and providing enterprise-wide network and application visibility – all while eliminating the need to increase bandwidth, storage or servers. Thousands of companies with distributed operations use Riverbed to make their IT infrastructure faster, less expensive and more responsive. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com.  

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

MEDIA CONTACT
Kristalle Ward
Riverbed Technology
415-247-8140
Kristalle.Ward@riverbed.com

INVESTOR RELATIONS CONTACT
Renee Lyall
Riverbed Technology
415-247-6353
Renee.Lyall@riverbed.com

 

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