Dudek Implements Riverbed Steelhead Mobile

Riverbed Technology announced that environmental and engineering company Dudek has deployed Riverbed Steelhead Mobile to enhance the efficiency of employees at remote jobsites. As a result of its deployment, Dudek has improved application performance for remote workers while saving money by avoiding additional bandwidth upgrades.

Dudek plans, designs, permits and manages projects involving natural resource management, infrastructure development and regulatory compliance. Its environmental and engineering professionals help public and private clients develop the long-term value of their assets by ensuring projects are technically and economically sound, regulatory-compliant and sustainable. Founded in 1980, Dudek’s main office is located in Encinitas, California with offices and remote worksites located across the U.S.

Dudek’s employees frequently share large files with clients, consultants, and other project team members located in remote offices and worksites across the U.S. Due to the geographical distance between locations and large size of the files, Dudek’s project managers were experiencing productivity-crippling delays when accessing its business critical-applications – Outlook, AutoCAD, SQL databases and file-shares. The application latency experienced by remote workers delayed access to valuable project information. Providing onsite, real-time displays of project files to clients was time-consuming and unwieldy. It was taking remote workers up to 30 minutes to transmit 200-300MB files from a remote worksite, significantly impacting Dudek’s service delivery cycles.

Dudek tried several approaches to address its application and IT infrastructure performance challenges, including process improvements, VPN access, file shares and bandwidth upgrades. "We continued to make financial investments to upgrade our bandwidth, but found that it was only a partial solution. For optimal access to files, the offsite end-users were logging into the VPN, and project files were copied to their laptops. Since having direct remote access of project files was too slow and subject to data corruption, having a local copy was the best option available. This often led to serious version control issues on key projects. Copies of the same files were exchanged between project team members, resulting in duplicate files at multiple locations," said Abe Esguerra, IT Director at Dudek.

Dudek realized it needed a solution that would allow its remote knowledge workers to be more efficient by eliminating redundant data and application latency from its IT infrastructure and wide-area network. The company saw a demo of Riverbed WAN optimization, was pleased with the results and immediately selected and implemented Riverbed as its WAN optimization vendor. During its evaluation, Dudek experienced a significant 60-80% WAN traffic data reduction, and as much as 95% for specific data types. To address its challenges, Dudek deployed 10 Steelhead appliances and installed Steelhead Mobile on the laptops of the first 50 users accessing the company’s most critical applications, with the remaining mobile users scheduled to receive the mobile client with their normal PC refresh.

By deploying Riverbed WAN optimization, Dudek has streamlined its processes and cut operational costs associated with team collaboration and client service. "Now with our Steelhead Mobile deployment, workers share files across the WAN and no longer mail CDs between offices. Also, the solution was so easy to install that our IT team spent only a few hours on the server implementation and a few minutes on each client installation. In comparison to the other appliances and software in my IT infrastructure, this is one of the easiest to install and maintain. When we take into account the simplicity, acceleration and support – the solution has paid for itself two-fold in less than a year."

An added benefit of the Riverbed solution for Dudek is that it provided Dudek the ability to be agile and expand to new geographical markets and attract the best talent – no matter their location – all while controlling costs.