Case Study: Freudenberg IT achieves accelerated application performance and 50% bandwidth reduction with Riverbed Steelhead appliances

Riverbed® Steelhead® Products Solve Data Management and Application Performance Problems for a Leading IT Service Provider

Freudenberg IT (FIT), a 500‑employee IT managed‑services provider within the Freudenberg Group, supports a globally distributed SMB client base and SAP environments. FIT was struggling with poor WAN application performance (SAP, SQL, MAPI, Lotus Notes), slow backups and replication, bandwidth congestion, and difficulties consolidating remote IT—issues that harmed client satisfaction and productivity.

FIT deployed Riverbed Steelhead WAN‑optimization appliances (95 appliances across FIT and client sites, plus 15 and a Central Management Console in FIT’s data center) to accelerate applications and optimize WAN traffic. The solution increased data throughput up to 4×, cut bandwidth consumption by about 50%, enabled server consolidation without performance loss, improved backup times and client satisfaction, and allowed FIT to roll out a new premium managed service.

Freudenberg IT

Heiko Rüschen

Team Manager