Case Study: Golder Associates achieves LAN-like global collaboration and mobile performance with Riverbed Steelhead

Riverbed Steelhead Appliances and Steelhead Mobile Provide Real-Time Collaboration Everywhere for Leading Environmental Planning Organization

Golder Associates, a global environmental engineering and consulting firm with over 5,000 employees in 150+ offices, needed to deploy a centralized SharePoint intranet and improve performance for Exchange, AutoCAD and backup traffic across a geographically dispersed, Cisco-based WAN. The firm also needed mobile staff and very small offices to have the same LAN-like access as larger branches without adding bandwidth.

Golder deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances in more than 55 sites, rolled out Steelhead Mobile for travelers and small offices, and used Riverbed’s Central Management Console for centralized control. The result: SharePoint and large-file access went from 10+ minutes to seconds, a mobile test dropped an 8 MB file from 46s to 3s (1s on subsequent access), WAN backup traffic fell by nearly 40% (daily backups reduced from gigabytes to megabytes), and global management became far simpler.

Golder Associates

Alison Ramsley

Leader of Global IT Services