Case Study: Eddie Stobart Group achieves IT consolidation and 60% faster file downloads with Riverbed Steelhead appliances

Eddie Stobart Group - Customer Case Study

Stobart Group is a major UK multimodal logistics provider (road, rail, sea and air) with over 5,300 staff and extensive fleets and warehouses. After rapid growth and acquisitions the company needed to consolidate six disparate IT environments into a single, centrally managed infrastructure, but users experienced severe delays accessing files and applications over the WAN—jeopardising productivity and collaboration—and a simple bandwidth upgrade would not address the latency problem.

Stobart trialled and then deployed Riverbed SteelHead appliances (14 units plus Central Management Console), which delivered immediate improvements: a 60% reduction in file download times, a threefold drop in bandwidth utilisation (from ~90% to ~30%), and examples of files going from 50 minutes to 50 seconds to download. The solution restored user productivity, enabled removal of local file servers, centralised backups and management, and avoided costly bandwidth upgrades.

Eddie Stobart Group

Vince Sparks

IT Director