Case Study: Willis Group Holdings achieves $30M IT consolidation and global app performance with Riverbed Steelhead

Riverbed Steelhead Products Enable IT Consolidation at Global Insurance Company

Willis Group Holdings, a global insurance broker with more than 300 offices and roughly 16,000 employees, faced a costly, fragmented IT environment after organic growth and acquisitions. Distributed servers, duplicate data centers and bandwidth-constrained international locations left many employees with poor access to centralized applications like Exchange and SharePoint and drove high maintenance and support costs.

Willis deployed 107 Riverbed Steelhead appliances and two Interceptors to optimize WAN traffic and cluster capacity, enabling consolidation of 200 major applications and thousands of smaller apps into a single Nashville data center. The solution delivered LAN-like performance over the WAN (peak data reduction ~82%, 4.2x capacity increase), removed many branch servers, improved global access and collaboration, and is projected to save about $30 million over five years.

Willis Group Holdings

Eoghan Doyle

Director of Infrastructure and Operations