Riverbed Delivers IT Efficiencies and Faster Communications for China's Leading Online Travel Service Provider
Bandwidth Utilization Reduced by up to 65 Percent and Application Response Time Increased up to 50 Times with Cost Savings
San Francisco – May 28, 2008 – Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced that Ctrip.com (Ctrip), China's leading one-stop online travel service provider, has deployed Riverbed® Steelhead® WDS appliances between its headquarters and two branch offices in China. The deployment of the Riverbed WDS solution has enabled Ctrip to reduce its bandwidth utilization by up to 65 percent and improve application performance across the network by as much as 50 times, thereby increasing IT efficiencies while providing cost savings.
"As an online travel service provider, Ctrip's operation relies heavily on rapid data throughput. The Riverbed Steelhead WDS solutions dramatically improve core business application response times and allow our employees to share information across the three locations while reducing overall data traffic," said Mr. Chen Di, head of Ctrip's Technology Department.
"Previously we would have had to purchase expensive bandwidth upgrades to support our growth, but with Riverbed we not only did not have to purchase more bandwidth, we actually reduced our existing bandwidth utilization leaving us much more room to grow – without additional cost. We have witnessed a 400 percent improvement in our network utilization efficiency, while our application response times have increased anywhere from five to 50 times. HTTP-based data compression was increased by as much as 88 percent," Mr Chen added.
Before deploying the Riverbed solution, Ctrip's branch offices were each connected to its data center through a 2MB internal link. As Ctrip's business grew, an enormous increase of information, including hotel reservations, flight schedules and status of customer order details, which was converging into the Shanghai headquarters, was beginning to adversely impact business operations and customer responsiveness.
Ctrip's initial steps to address this problem involved an extensive evaluation of WDS technologies, with the best test results coming from Riverbed products. Riverbed accelerated application performance by five to fifty times. Ctrip noted that this increase in performance far outweighed the likely performance increase that would come with the purchase of additional bandwidth, which offered an increase of only two to three times.
Ctrip is China's leading online travel service provider, offering more than 19 million members complete services including hotel, air ticket and holiday resort reservations, business trip management and arrangement of special suppliers, and responding to travel information enquiries. Headquartered in Shanghai, Ctrip has branch offices in Beijing and Guangzhou with more than 7,000 employees nationwide.
Steelhead Products
Riverbed WDS solutions enable organizations of all sizes to overcome a host of severe problems, including poor application performance and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites. By speeding the performance of applications between data centers, remote offices and mobile workers by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times, Riverbed's award-winning Steelhead WDS products enable companies to consolidate IT, improve backup and replication processes to ensure data integrity, and improve staff productivity and collaboration. Steelhead products have been deployed in organizations ranging from the world's largest corporations with offices around the globe to small companies with a couple of sites that are just miles apart. To learn more, view Riverbed's demo: www.riverbed.com/pr/jack.
About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS) solutions for companies worldwide. 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. Additional information about Riverbed (Nasdaq: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com.
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 implementation 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-Q filed with the SEC on April 29, 2008. 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.
Riverbed Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead, RiOS, Interceptor, 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.
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Media Contacts:
Kristalle Ward
Riverbed Technology
415-247-8140
kristalle.ward@riverbed.com
