Case Study: Engen achieves 80% WAN data reduction and centralized IT with Riverbed

Engen - Customer Case Study

Engen is a South African energy group with around 3,500 employees and a retail and distribution presence across 30 Sub‑Saharan African countries and islands. Its sprawling footprint—50 depots, regional offices and eight data centers—created a complex IT estate with long‑distance links, WAN bottlenecks and multiple regional servers, causing sluggish access to critical apps (like SAP), frequent user complaints and backup window failures.

Engen deployed Riverbed SteelHead and SteelFusion to centralize applications and optimize WAN traffic, simplifying branch IT and strengthening backups. Proof‑of‑concepts showed dramatic gains (file copies up to 75x faster, 3x link speed and ~80% WAN data reduction), enabling a full Windows 7 desktop at depots, faster file transfers, fewer support calls, reduced bandwidth needs and improved data protection—with plans to roll the solution out to other African affiliates.

Engen

Nicholas Lain

Architecture Specialist