Case Study: Abacus Group achieves 5x faster applications and 70–80% bandwidth reduction with Riverbed Steelhead appliances

Riverbed Steelhead Appliances Enable Electronics Distributor to Accelerate Applications and Cut Network Costs

Abacus Group plc, a leading European distributor of electronic components with 40 sites and 635 remote users, faced poor application performance as its bespoke systems became increasingly “chatty” across the WAN. Rapid growth drove higher traffic and large file distributions (up to 35MB) that took ~1.5 hours per site, and a plain bandwidth upgrade (estimated £250–300k) would not address inherent latency problems.

Abacus deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances at headquarters and eight branch offices (with 14 more planned), with setups taking about two hours, to eliminate protocol inefficiencies and WAN latency. The result: up to 5x faster application performance, 70–80% reduction in bandwidth use (with specific tests showing a 96% cut in Exchange traffic), avoided major network upgrade costs, and markedly improved end-user experience and IT productivity.

Abacus Group

Gary Jennings

Networks & Security Manager