Case Study: Essar Group achieves LAN-like application performance and significant bandwidth cost savings with Riverbed Steelhead WAN optimization

Riverbed solutions strengthen global conglomerates IT infrastructure

Essar Group, a Mumbai‑headquartered multinational with operations across five continents and revenues of about $27 billion, was struggling to maintain acceptable application performance as its global footprint and branch count grew. Remote offices faced low bandwidth, high latency and frequent disconnections that hurt productivity and slowed backup/replication, and buying more bandwidth proved prohibitively expensive.

Essar deployed Riverbed SteelHead WAN‑optimization appliances and a SteelHead Mobile Controller at key sites, managed centrally via Riverbed’s console. The solution delivered LAN‑like application performance over the WAN, significant per‑site bandwidth savings, faster backups, and improved end‑user productivity, with an expected ROI of roughly 12–27 months and infrastructure in place to consolidate servers and scale as the business grows.

Essar Group

Jayantha Prabhu

Chief Technology Officer