Case Study: Packard Bell achieves centralized IT consolidation and up to 85% faster application performance with Riverbed SteelHead appliances

Riverbed Steelhead Appliances Enable a Consolidation Strategy for Consumer Electronics Maufacturer

Packard Bell, a leading European consumer electronics and PC brand, operated a geographically distributed IT environment with a centralized datacenter in the Netherlands and 14 international sites. Facing high maintenance and support costs from local servers and a planned migration to Exchange 2003, the company wanted to centralize its infrastructure while preserving transparent, high-performance access for remote users.

Packard Bell deployed 15 Riverbed Steelhead appliances across its 14 sites, first testing between Shanghai and the Netherlands, then rolling out each office in about a week. The WAN optimization platform enabled full server and Exchange consolidation, cut bandwidth use roughly 50% (with FTP gains up to 98% in tests), boosted application performance by 70–85%, removed 38 remote servers to date, and delivered significant hardware, operating and support cost savings.

Packard Bell

Pascal Chotard

MIS - IT Operations Director