Case Study: Parsons Construction achieves real-time collaboration and accelerated WAN performance with Riverbed Steelhead

Riverbed Steelhead Products Enable Application Acceleration for One of the Worlds Largest Construction Companies

Parsons is a global, employee-owned engineering and construction firm with over 11,000 employees delivering large, distributed projects. With Perot Systems managing its IT, Parsons struggled to enable real-time collaboration across heterogeneous WANs (MPLS, satellite and greenfield sites), slow access to large CAD and Microsoft files, and costly, unreliable remote backups—putting high-value projects at risk.

Perot Systems deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances (30 units) with a central management console to accelerate applications and consolidate data centers. The solution made WAN collaboration practical, cut backup windows from ~10 hours to 1–1.5 hours and reduced bandwidth use by about 90%, helped complete major projects on time with fewer expenses, and significantly improved disaster-ready backup and replication.

Parsons Construction

Mike Pinkston

former Team Manager and currently Network Design Advisor