Case Study: CONTECH Stormwater Solutions achieves real-time bi-coastal collaboration and 50x WAN performance with Riverbed Steelhead appliances

Riverbed Steelhead Appliances Facilitate a Merger and Enable Real-time Collaboration for Teams a Nation Apart

CONTECH Stormwater Solutions (CSS) is a $100M company formed by merging East and West Coast stormwater businesses and operating three sites linked by an MPLS T1 WAN. The distributed setup caused severe performance problems—CRM replication took over eight hours, large Autodesk Inventor CAD files couldn’t be shared in real time across 3,000 miles, and latency undermined ERP, Citrix, VoIP and video conferencing despite available bandwidth.

CSS deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances at each office, delivering LAN-like performance: order-entry replication dropped to about 10 minutes, a 24 MB DWG transfer fell from 164 seconds to 4 seconds (≈41x) with an average 17x file-transfer improvement, plus up to 50x application acceleration and ~94% bandwidth reduction. As a result they centralized servers and Exchange, successfully rolled out Citrix, enabled real-time engineering collaboration, and restored reliable VoIP/video without costly bandwidth upgrades.

CONTECH Stormwater Solutions

Mike Haskell

IT Manager