Mantrac Group Reduces Bandwidth Costs With Riverbed

Riverbed Technology announced that Mantrac Group, an authorized Caterpillar dealer, has deployed 11 Riverbed Steelhead appliances, resulting in an estimated savings of nearly $300,000 per year.

The Riverbed solution has enabled Mantrac Group to reduce its bandwidth costs by almost 75 percent and delivered an ROI within just 10 months.

Mantrac Group is an authorized Caterpillar dealer, distributing and supporting Caterpillar construction machines, power systems and material-handling equipment in nine countries across three continents.

Amgad Yassin, group business solutions manager at Mantrac Group, explains: "We wanted to improve our data collection system and automate a number of business processes, while reducing operational costs. In order to achieve this, senior management proposed an IT consolidation project. However, for this project to be successful, we recognized that users would need fast and reliable access to data over the wide area network (WAN). This would be critical to the success of our business."

Mantrac Group had already investigated WAN optimization solutions and ran proof of concept tests with Cisco, Citrix and Riverbed. "Riverbed delivered the best results when uploading and downloading CIFS, MAPI and HTTP files," Yassin says. "Riverbed also provided the best price to performance ratio."

Steelhead appliances have now been successfully deployed at Mantrac Group’s headquarters in Egypt and in an additional 10 key locations by Riverbed reseller IP-Protocol Inc.