Case Study: Greenhill & Co. achieves IT consolidation and 66% Exchange cost reduction with Riverbed Steelhead appliances

Riverbed Steelhead Appliances Enable Investment Management Firm to Consolidate IT Infrastructure

Greenhill & Co. is a global investment banking firm with about 160 employees and offices in New York, London, Frankfurt and Dallas. Its small IT team faced growing network complexity as email and Windows apps spread across offices: Exchange 2003 performed poorly over the WAN, causing slow application performance, data sprawl, reliability and security challenges that blocked the firm’s consolidation goals.

Greenhill deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances at headquarters and three remote sites to accelerate MAPI and CIFS traffic, enabling migration from three Exchange servers to a single, high‑availability co‑location server. Results included email delivery falling from minutes to seconds, 97% lower WAN utilization, a 66% cut in Exchange costs, $60,000 annual bandwidth savings (including a DS3→T1 reduction saving $5,000/month), no new remote‑office servers, dramatically reduced IT management overhead and a four‑month payback.

Greenhill & Co

John Shaffer

Director of IT