Aelia Deploys Riverbed WDS

SAN FRANCISCO -- Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), announced today that Aelia, one of the leading travel retailers in Europe, has selected and deployed Riverbeds Steelhead® WDS appliances at sites in France, the UK and Poland. With Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances, Aelia has accelerated core application performance, including SAP and Lotus Notes, allowing distributed employees to collaborate with distant co-workers, regardless of location or time zone.

Aelia has revenues of over 500 million Euros from over 130 sales points. Specializing in airport retail, Aelia is also active in mainline travel retail networks, catering to the specifics of each environment, like airports, in-flight sales, Euro tunnel and ferries. Aelia operates at 16 airports in France, the UK and Poland. Aelia operates in-flight sales for the largest international and regional airlines through its subsidiary AIR.

Aelia sought to improve application performance between remote sites, while at the same time consolidating storage resources to control costs and simplify security management. Aelia’s highly distributed workforce utilizes SAP both in GUI (fat client) and Intranet (thin client), plus Lotus Notes for email and collaboration. In a centralized IT environment, Aelia employees everywhere would need access to files and enterprise systems located on distant servers on a regular and timely basis. Aelia’s IT staff recognized that the distributed nature of the corporation, combined with centralized IT, would make collaboration between offices difficult and impractical, as latency would likely slow the performance of centralized applications. The company sought to overcome this dilemma with WDS.

Olivier Rideau, systems and production group manager at Aelia, recalled the process for analyzing WDS solutions: “We wanted to make sure we did a full analysis of the marketplace. We considered a number of products, but primarily focused on Cisco and Riverbed®. We considered the Cisco WAAS products for testing; however, they were not mature enough to provide the efficiency we needed.”

Riverbed Technology Inc.