Case Study: Savola Group achieves $100,000/year bandwidth savings and faster application performance with Riverbed SteelHead appliances

Foods company increases bandwidth capacity, improves application performance and realizes significant cost savings with riverbed Steelhead appliances

The Savola Group, a Saudi-listed foods and diversified conglomerate with 17,000 employees across 100+ offices in ten countries and $5.6B in annual revenue, faced rapidly growing WAN demand as usage of business-critical applications (Oracle E‑Business Suite, Microsoft Exchange) nearly tripled in three years. IT needed a cost-effective way to increase bandwidth capacity, reduce latency, centralize application servers and support continued acquisition- and staff-driven growth.

Savola deployed Riverbed SteelHead appliances and a Central Management Console across its WAN, enabling centralized management and mesh deployment of optimization appliances. The solution cut WAN traffic by about 2 TB/month, saved roughly $100,000/year in bandwidth upgrade costs, reduced Oracle traffic by 47%, MAPI by 60% and CIFS by 65%, removed 11 local mail servers, and improved application performance and employee productivity while enabling further IT consolidation.

Savola Group

Asif Vanoo

IT Infrastructure Manager