Idex Groupe Selects Riverbed and 62 Steelhead Appliances

Riverbed Technology announced that Idex Groupe, a French private energy and environmental services company, has deployed 62 Riverbed Steelhead appliances, the Riverbed Central Management Console (CMC) and implemented Steelhead Mobile for up to 40 concurrent users.

As a result of its Riverbed deployment, Idex Groupe has improved its data backup and recovery system and accelerated key applications, including CRM and ERP applications and SharePoint, resulting in greater employee collaboration and improved productivity. The deployment also allowed Idex Groupe to centralize its IT infrastructure, resulting in a 50% reduction in servers and an expected savings to the company of approximately $300,000 per year in reduced support and maintenance costs.

"Without Riverbed, the cost of improving and centralizing our IT resources would have doubled. Instead we’ve now seen a huge savings that we can invest into other areas of the business," says Ivan Gautreau, systems and network manager at Idex Groupe.

Idex Groupe is one of France’s largest private energy and environmental services companies. The company designs and implements solutions for the production and distribution of energy, and manages more than one million households across France. The company has 3,000 employees based in 100 geographically dispersed offices.

Gautreau explains the challenges the company needed to overcome: "Idex Groupe has a distributed infrastructure, with many of the branch offices requiring two servers – one for mail and one for ERP applications. Data backups were cumbersome and performed at each branch office location. We wanted to centralize the infrastructure in order to reduce costs and simplify management, but we were concerned that this would result in poor application performance for our employees."

To overcome this, Idex Groupe considered doubling its existing bandwidth capacity, but concluded that this would be too costly an option and that it would not be a complete solution to address Idex Groupe’s challenges. Instead, the company investigated wide area network (WAN) optimization as a cost-effective alternative, and chose to test Riverbed.

Following a successful demonstration, Idex Groupe has now deployed 62 Steelhead appliances in 62 office locations, the CMC and implemented Steelhead Mobile for up to 40 concurrent users. Previously Idex Groupe housed two servers in some of the larger offices and was able to reduce the number of servers from 70 to 35 after its deployment of Steelhead appliances. The 50% reduction in the number of servers, Idex Groupe estimates will save approximately $300,000 per year in reduced support and maintenance costs. Idex Groupe was also able to improve its backup processes and accelerate more than 20 critical and non-critical applications, including CRM, ERP and finance applications.