Case Study: Waltons achieves 2-3x faster application performance and avoids costly bandwidth upgrades with Riverbed SteelHead

Riverbed Steelhead appliances accelerate application performance over the WAN for major retail organization

Waltons, founded in 1949 and now the largest national office-products supplier in Southern Africa, operates five regional offices and over 100 branches across South Africa, Namibia and Mozambique. After centralizing Exchange and SharePoint, branch users experienced severe WAN delays, and upgrading bandwidth for roughly 90% of sites proved prohibitively expensive.

Waltons ran a Riverbed Steelhead proof-of-concept and then deployed 70 appliances, a simple inline solution that immediately improved application responsiveness. The rollout avoided costly bandwidth upgrades and delivered 2–3× faster file downloads, about a 50% drop in bandwidth usage, restored usability of Exchange/SharePoint and ERP apps, improved collaboration and productivity, and enabled consolidation steps such as removing five regional Exchange servers.

Waltons

Laurence Slotow

National IT Manager