Rouse & Co. International Buys 13 Riverbed Steelhead Appliances

Riverbed Technology announced global intellectual property firm Rouse & Co. International has selected and deployed Riverbed Steelhead WDS appliances across its organization. In 2004 Rouse & Co. International initiated a process of IT consolidation, centralizing ICT services to its UK operation. However, bandwidth constraints and avoiding an expensive managed, peer-to-peer MPLS circuit upgrade proved to be a challenge. Following the deployment of Riverbed Steelhead appliances across its 16 offices in nine countries around the world, the company has seen increased network capacity by almost a factor of five and reduced file transfer times from minutes to seconds.

Launched in the UK in 1990, Rouse & Co. International provides a comprehensive portfolio of intellectual property services, from the implementation of global investigation, enforcement and protection strategies, to the provision of commercial services, such as filing, research, management and data protection.

Jonathan Bruce, global head of IT at Rouse & Co. International, explained the problems they were encountering: "We were experiencing poor application performance across the wide area network (WAN), while the cost of upgrading our Internet-based, inter-office VPNs to managed P2P MPLS circuits was simply not viable – especially in those countries with state-owned telecoms. Time recording and billing for fee earners, the trademark database and our Intranet were the main culprits, although all applications centralized in the UK were subject to poor performance across the WAN."

After an unsuccessful attempt to overcome implementation problems and deploy a WDS alternative from Peribit (later acquired by Juniper Networks), Rouse & Co. International still needed a solution. Looking for something that provided immediate results, Bruce chose the Riverbed Steelhead appliances for a scalable approach to acceleration of applications across the WAN. Bruce explains, "It was the ease-of-deployment and simplicity of support, combined with the ability to accelerate a broad range of applications, that really differentiated Riverbed for us. The Riverbed Steelhead appliance does what it says on the box: you just plug it in and it works."

Starting in the UK and Indonesia, 13 Riverbed Steelhead appliances were deployed in 12 Rouse & Co. International offices through a phased rollout. This deployment included the Riverbed Central Management Console (CMC), responsible for simplified management of the Riverbed Steelhead appliances, and providing a single, web-based interface giving greater visibility of application performance across the WAN. "The CMC definitely eases the administrative burden and you get an instant view across all of the appliances," stated Bruce.

Following the deployment of the Steelhead appliances, Rouse & Co. International has experienced improved performance in a number of areas. "In one month, the total reduction in bandwidth utilization across all applications and sites was 78% – delivering a 4.5 times increase in capacity," highlighted Bruce. "And opening a document in Jakarta from London is 34 times faster, thanks to a 97% reduction in latency on the link."

The adoption of Riverbed Steelhead appliances has also led to associated improvements. The upgrade of the inter-office VPNs to managed MPLS-based P2P circuits is no longer required, and there has been an 80% reduction in calls to the internal IT helpdesk, enabling IT staff to spend more time on proactive projects. Bruce summarizes, "This has given us the agility to deploy applications within the company and deploy them quickly, because the network is no longer a show stopper."