Case Study: Al Abbar Group achieves up to 30x faster application performance and improved employee productivity with Riverbed SteelHead appliances

Riverbed Steelhead appliances accelerate applications and increase employee productivity for engineering company

Al Abbar Group is a multinational engineering and manufacturing firm with more than 2,500 employees across the UAE, India and the Philippines, specializing in architectural building envelopes. After centralizing core systems (SQL, Exchange, ERP, CAD) in a Dubai data center, branch users experienced severe WAN latency and slow application access, causing frustration and lost productivity.

Al Abbar deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances following a trial to accelerate email and file sharing; applications now run up to 30× faster, a 10MB document download dropped from five minutes to 40 seconds, bandwidth use fell 2–3×, and file transfer times improved ~3.5×. These gains restored employee productivity, enabled effective VoIP use, and paved the way for centralized backups and further accelerated deployments.

Al Abbar Group

Manoj Gopalakrishnan

Al Abbar Groups, ICT manager