Riverbed Doubles Performance

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- Riverbed Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: RVBD), the technology and market leader inwide-area data services (WDS), today announced that Family HealthInternational (FHI) has selected and successfully deployed Riverbed'sSteelhead(R) WDS appliances. FHI deployed Riverbed's appliances inoffices throughout the world to optimize the performance ofapplications between remote sites, make better use of its bandwidth,and to significantly improve its employee efficiency and overallproductivity.

Formed in 1971, FHI is among the largest and most establishednonprofit organizations active in international public health with amission to improve lives worldwide through research, education, andservices in family health. FHI manages research and field activitiesin more than seventy countries to meet the public health needs ofsome of the world's most vulnerable people. The organization workswith a wide variety of partners including governmental andnongovernmental organizations, private foundations, researchinstitutions, community groups, and the private sector.

As the Chief Information Officer at FHI, Mark Dronzek is responsiblefor delivering information technology services and infrastructure on aglobal basis, including to all 40 of FHI's country offices. Withapproximately two-thirds of its nearly 1,800 employees located indeveloping countries, FHI currently uses in-country ISPs for itswide-area network (WAN), which in reality is a collection ofautonomous sites. Availability and quality of service varies fromcountry to country, which made interactions between internationaloffices challenging and required excessive amounts of time todownload email and documents from other office locations, if theydownloaded at all. Dronzek needed to find a way to cost-effectivelyspeed access to data and applications in order to increase theorganization's efficiency and ability to collaborate.

FHI's Director of IT International Operations, Mark McCullough, andDronzek 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 alsoconsolidating each country's Exchange email application into asingle, global instance while simultaneously expanding ActiveDirectory globally. In parallel, they evaluated several alternativesfor WAN optimization, including wide-area augmentation system (WAAS)products from Cisco, Packeteer, and Juniper. Cisco was a naturalchoice for FHI since it is a Cisco partner, but FHI encounteredchallenges based on installation and functionality that caused it tohalt that evaluation.

While looking into alternative solutions, FHI came across Riverbed'stechnical white papers highlighting performance benchmarks. Thedocuments so impressed FHI that the company tested Riverbed's solutionin its corporate headquarters to simulate a high latency environmentover VSATs. In less than 30 minutes, FHI was able to set up twoevaluation boxes. "We were amazed by the results," said Dronzek. "Thetests we conducted gave us even better performance results than whatwas published in the white papers. As soon as we saw howuser-friendly the deployment was and how impressive the test resultswere, we knew Riverbed was the solution for us."Riverbed Technology Inc.