Mirvac Selects Riverbed in Australia

Riverbed Technology, Inc., in wide-area data services (WDS), announced that
integrated real estate group Mirvac has selected and deployed
Riverbed’s Steelhead WDS appliances at 23 sites across Australia.

Mirvac is a leading integrated real estate group, listed on the
Australian Securities Exchange with more than $26.3 billion of
activities under control across the real estate funds management and
development spectrum. Established in 1972, Mirvac has 35 years of
experience in the real estate industry and has an unmatched reputation
for delivering quality products across all of its businesses.

With over 300 architects working on projects across Australia,
Mirvac initially purchased five appliances to accelerate application
performance and enable the sharing of architectural resources across
its five major property development divisions in Perth, Melbourne,
Parramatta, Brisbane and Sydney.

"The way CAD works, with everyone virtually working on the same
set of very large files, it simply was not possible for people to
collaborate on projects across Australia," explains Chris Kennett,
Group IT Manager, Mirvac.

"Previously, whenever we required specialists’ skills for a
particular project, or needed extra resources, we either transferred
our architects between states to meet the varying skills demands of
the different projects or sourced them locally."

Commenting on the impacts of the initial Steelhead appliance
deployment, Mr. Kennett said, "Mirvac has run a couple of projects now
using teams spread across Australia and the benefits of being able to
share resources quickly have paid back the investment in the
Riverbed technology many times over. The teams communicate using
text messaging and, occasionally, peer-to-peer video conferencing from
the desktop, but the main benefit to collaboration is having the
remote architects connected to the project data at LAN-like speeds.
Being able to collaborate in this way has helped to reduce the
pressure caused by the shortage of staff, and the time lag in bringing
new people on and up to speed with Mirvac’s procedures and processes."

Sharing of resources across the Group as demand fluctuates between
geographical locations ensures Mirvac meets its project deadlines
using the best people available.

Mr. Kennett says because the Steelhead products had already been
implemented at a number of architectural firms in the United States
who use AutoCAD, the decision to choose Riverbed for its WDS
requirements was easy. The simplicity of implementation and management
of the Steelheads was also a factor in choosing Riverbed.

"The ease of installing Riverbed’s solutions on site is a
significant plus," Mr Kennett says. "The Steelhead appliances can
virtually just be plugged into the network and immediately perform."

Mirvac has many remote offices, including shopping centres,
construction sites, and hotels. After installing the Riverbed
technology, Mirvac realized the products could also resolve issues the
company was experiencing with Citrix performance across a
latency-bound and congested network, as well as the related
functionality issues the organization was experiencing at some of its
larger sites. On these larger sites, the Steelhead appliances have now
replaced Citrix as the tool for delivering remote applications.

Mirvac has implemented the Steelhead appliances at one of its most
remote hotels at Bunker Bay on Western Australia’s Margaret River,
paying back the cost of the appliance in months due to reduced network
costs.

"Riverbed is part of our strategy for rolling out LAN-like
connectivity to our larger sites and, with Mirvac’s rapid growth both
here and overseas, will be part of our expansion plan as well," Mr.
Kennett says.

Mirvac also plans to implement a centralized backup and
replication process at its data center, and is planning to consolidate
the state-based Exchange servers into one Exchange server. The
significant reduction of traffic crossing the WAN and the acceleration
of the respective applications by the Steelhead appliances will make
these strategies possible.

Steve Dixon, regional director, Australia/New Zealand at Riverbed,
says the geographical spread of offices across the country makes WDS
technology particularly relevant to Australia.

Riverbed Technology Inc.

Mirvac Hotels & Resort