Riverbed Helps Gem Group

SAN FRANCISCO -- Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:RVBD - News), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced that The Gem Group, Inc. has selected and successfully deployed Riverbeds Steelhead® appliances in its Lawrence, MA headquarters and offshore manufacturing operations in Shenzhen, China. With Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances, The Gem Group employees are able to quickly access large files and collaborate in real-time on the design of new products, which has dramatically improved productivity and shortened time-to-market for new products developed by the company — all while maintaining lower cost and easier-to-manage centralized IT infrastructure.

The Gem Group, which includes the popular Gemline® products and services, is a global leader in producing targeted products to promote brand awareness. In 2001, the Company moved its offshore sourcing and design facility to a new 55,000 square foot facility in Southern China. Headquarters, located in Lawrence, MA, has been expanded to 155,000 square feet. The Gem Group now has over 600 employees worldwide and manufactures an extensive line of branded products, including clothing, business accessories, gifts, sports gear and other branded items.

Offshoring continues to mature from manufacturing and assembly to more upstream and downstream areas such as engineering, production and service. At the same time, small and medium-sized businesses are beginning to send some products offshore, creating a new set of business challenges. According to Roland Berger Strategy Consulting, the proportion of medium-sized firms with international operations will rise from 60 percent to 75 percent in 2007, and for small firms from 40 percent to over 60 percent. Furthermore, over 70 percent of offshoring projects proved successful in 2006, and were not reversed, according to Roland Berger.

The Gem Group’s objective was to reduce costs and save time in processing custom orders on a 24x7 basis for customers of its branded product portfolio. With Riverbed®, they were able to meet a three-month mandate to deploy applications and streamlined processes to the China office. Typically, the company does extensive research on IT products; for example, they evaluated products for a recent storage area networking (SAN) project for nine months. With Riverbed, The Gem Group was able to complete the evaluation in one week and make a purchase decision within one month. The company chose not to test other WDS vendors, like Cisco or Juniper for three reasons. First, they knew Riverbed was the industry leader in WDS. Second, testing Riverbed was fast and easy, and third, the Riverbed test results were very compelling and exceeded expectations.

Riverbed Technology Inc.