Case Study: McLagan Partners achieves near-instant application access and avoids WAN upgrades with Riverbed SteelHead appliances

McLagan Partners Selects Riverbed Steelhead Appliances over Juniper for Global WAN Acceleration Project

McLagan Partners, a global financial‐services consulting firm with offices in the US, Europe and Asia, faced severe WAN performance problems: its SQL-based "Controls" application took roughly four minutes to load for remote users, daily content pushes were backlogged for about 30 days, and server sprawl plus international bandwidth constraints threatened costly upgrades and limited disaster-recovery options.

McLagan deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances in six offices to centralize application servers and accelerate WAN traffic. The result: roughly 100x improvement in response time (app access dropped to just seconds), the 30‑day content queue was eliminated within two days, WAN utilization fell from ~90% to under 30%, an imminent bandwidth upgrade was avoided, and a faster DR approach using VMware plus Riverbed was enabled.

McLagan Partners

John Anderson

Vice President