Skilled Group Retains Riverbed

Riverbed Technology announced that recruitment company SKILLED Group has selected Riverbed Steelhead appliances – including its Steelhead Mobile client software – for installation at up to 170 sites across Australia. The deployment will allow significant reduction in wide area network (WAN) bandwidth usage and costs, accelerate application performance across the network and allow SKILLED Group to save money by consolidating IT infrastructure.

SKILLED Group is Australia’s leading provider of staffing services providing skilled and semi-skilled staff for industries including mining and resources, oil and gas, transport, health, manufacturing and food. It has 170 offices scattered throughout Australia ranging in size from two to 200 people. As such, the organisation needed a flexible solution which suited sites of all sizes.

"The Riverbed Steelhead Mobile PC client acceleration software was a critical component of the solution for us," says Leigh Berrell, Group Manager IT Strategy and Architecture, SKILLED Group. "The Steelhead Mobile PC client was exactly what we needed to serve offices with just a few people. It worked as well as Riverbed said it would during the proof of concept and is already helping workers in far-flung locations boost their productivity."

For a company that manages up to 60,000 employees, staff productivity and network performance are critical. Before installing the Riverbed appliances, the company realised it was fast approaching capacity on its WAN. As the WAN is used to support the weekly timesheet processing of 25,000 employees, maintaining performance is a key concern. SKILLED Group is currently deploying a new ERP system and was concerned that any network congestion would impact that system’s performance. Berrell says this is when the company decided Wide Area Data Services (WDS) was the answer.

"Our new ERP system needs to run efficiently across the WAN," he says. "Any performance problems suffered at remote locations would affect user productivity. Instead of buying more bandwidth, we decided acceleration through WDS was a better way to go. We did some market research and spoke to a few companies who had gone down the same path, and Riverbed came out at the top of the list. After putting out a request for tender, we went through an evaluation process and, again, Riverbed emerged as the clear leader for what we needed."

A trial of the Riverbed Steelhead appliances then followed, with SKILLED Group installing devices at its data center, a state head office and a small office. Berrell says the outcome lived up to their expectations, with the company’s bandwidth utilization dropping by more than half for those locations.

"We saw a large data reduction for both WAN connections we tested," he says. "We also got some very positive feedback from users who noticed a dramatic improvement in application performance across the optimised network. Even some of our IT people felt the appliances had made a real difference to their workload – and IT folk can be very skeptical of new products."

Berrell says the support from both Riverbed and Riverbed partner, O2 Networks, which installed the appliances, has been excellent.

"One of the reasons we went with Riverbed was because we felt they and O2 Networks were providing very good support and information," says Berrell. "It was a very positive experience dealing with both companies throughout the proof of concept and this has continued since we began the implementation. They have gone out of their way to ensure the process is painless."

An unexpected benefit for SKILLED Group was the detailed network reporting and visibility that Riverbed Steelhead appliances have provided. This has allowed SKILLED to fine-tune the network better than ever.

"We’ve managed to detect and resolve subtle issues more easily – such as intermittent telco line quality problems that were causing data retransmission for some sites – which used to be harder to identify before the Riverbed deployment."

SKILLED Group is currently rolling out the first phase of the implementation to 35 sites. The second phase rollout will allow the company to eliminate up to 50 file servers from remote locations, and enable the organisation to save money through consolidation of IT infrastructure.

"We used to be a very distributed organisation in terms of IT infrastructure because it simply wasn’t feasible to run things like large backups and print servers over the network," Berrell explains. "The Riverbed Steelhead appliances are allowing us to change our IT model to drive ongoing cost savings and achieve simpler management and, because download times are a fraction of what they once were, people are more motivated to use products such as SharePoint, which again centralises critical information and improves collaboration."