Mobile Phone Operator The Zain Group Deploys 75 Riverbed Appliances

Riverbed Technology announced that mobile phone operator The Zain Group has selected and deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances at 75 sites. As a result, the company has experienced increased application acceleration and a return on investment in seven months.

The Zain Group has deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances in Iraq, where the company has nearly 8 million customers who rely on Zain to provide them with secure, affordable, always-on cellular service. The company has set a goal to become one of the top ten leading telecom companies by 2011, with a goal of 150 million customers. As part of that effort, the company has launched its ACE (Accelerate, Consolidate, Expand) initiative. ACE seeks to extract superior value from existing assets through three main thrusts: accelerating growth in Africa; consolidating existing assets; and expanding into adjacent markets.

To meet the ACE goal of consolidating existing assets, the company has been re-architected to minimize operational expense, consolidating certain activities and services to improve data security, reduce IT overhead and improve overall back-end operations. Consolidated activities include disaster recovery, revenue assurance, fraud monitoring and access to Exchange servers. During consolidation efforts of these operations, the company recognized that reliable and fast transfer of data and voice between branches, data centers, call centers and regional customer care offices would be critical for the success of the project.

Zain had previously been using a fiber link to transfer billing and other data to its data center for processing. However, according to Riad Mounir, IT director at Zain Iraq: "We had difficulty sending information. The security situation prevented us from expanding the fiber network, but to ensure timely billing and security of our data, we needed to replicate customer usage info on an hourly basis. Our existing fiber link couldn’t handle the load so we shifted all data to our satellite and microwave links. Latency and limited bandwidth were both constraints."

FutureTech, a Kuwait-based solutions provider, helped identify and implement a complete WAN optimization solution architected from the ground up to ensure fast response times for applications and data in this consolidated and bandwidth-constrained environment.

When asked about the selection process, Mounir confirmed that: "Working closely with FutureTech, we considered offerings from Cisco, Juniper, and Riverbed. We chose Riverbed over the competition because of its proven leadership in the marketplace combined with its ability to deliver superior acceleration and bandwidth optimization."

Riverbed has enabled the centralization of assets, while providing field employees with real-time access to secure applications and data. Zain is now able to meet its business goal of replicating billing data hourly, while response times for applications such as Exchange and databases have improved by 20X.

The Steelhead appliances have also increased the capacity of the network by 3-4X, depending on the location. For example, the link between two remote locations in the Middle East is now able to carry four times the traffic that it could prior to the installation of the Steelhead appliances. This capacity increase has improved quality assurance for voice and video conferencing by allowing dedicated bandwidth for these critical applications.

According to Mounir, the increased capacity delivered by the Steelhead appliances has also resulted in significant cost savings. "Without Riverbed, we would have had to make a substantial investment in bandwidth. I estimate that we are saving an average of USD 144,000 per month by working with Riverbed. We’ve seen a return on investment of seven months."