SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- Riverbed Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: RVBD), the technology and market leader in
wide-area data services (WDS), today announced that Family Health
International (FHI) has selected and successfully deployed Riverbed's
Steelhead(R) WDS appliances. FHI deployed Riverbed's appliances in
offices throughout the world to optimize the performance of
applications between remote sites, make better use of its bandwidth,
and to significantly improve its employee efficiency and overall
productivity.
Formed in 1971, FHI is among the largest and most established
nonprofit organizations active in international public health with a
mission to improve lives worldwide through research, education, and
services in family health. FHI manages research and field activities
in more than seventy countries to meet the public health needs of
some of the world's most vulnerable people. The organization works
with a wide variety of partners including governmental and
nongovernmental organizations, private foundations, research
institutions, community groups, and the private sector.
As the Chief Information Officer at FHI, Mark Dronzek is responsible
for delivering information technology services and infrastructure on a
global basis, including to all 40 of FHI's country offices. With
approximately two-thirds of its nearly 1,800 employees located in
developing countries, FHI currently uses in-country ISPs for its
wide-area network (WAN), which in reality is a collection of
autonomous sites. Availability and quality of service varies from
country to country, which made interactions between international
offices challenging and required excessive amounts of time to
download email and documents from other office locations, if they
downloaded at all. Dronzek needed to find a way to cost-effectively
speed access to data and applications in order to increase the
organization's efficiency and ability to collaborate.
FHI's Director of IT International Operations, Mark McCullough, and
Dronzek began to design and build an organizational wide area network
(WAN) for FHI, starting by implementing very small aperture terminals
(VSATs) for satellite access from Country Offices. They are also
consolidating each country's Exchange email application into a
single, global instance while simultaneously expanding Active
Directory globally. In parallel, they evaluated several alternatives
for WAN optimization, including wide-area augmentation system (WAAS)
products from Cisco, Packeteer, and Juniper. Cisco was a natural
choice for FHI since it is a Cisco partner, but FHI encountered
challenges based on installation and functionality that caused it to
halt that evaluation.
While looking into alternative solutions, FHI came across Riverbed's
technical white papers highlighting performance benchmarks. The
documents so impressed FHI that the company tested Riverbed's solution
in its corporate headquarters to simulate a high latency environment
over VSATs. In less than 30 minutes, FHI was able to set up two
evaluation boxes. "We were amazed by the results," said Dronzek. "The
tests we conducted gave us even better performance results than what
was published in the white papers. As soon as we saw how
user-friendly the deployment was and how impressive the test results
were, we knew Riverbed was the solution for us."
