Case Study: Philip Morris International achieves 5x application performance and 2x bandwidth reduction with Riverbed Steelhead

Riverbed Technology improves application performance in private cloud environment, resulting in reduced costs, and increased employee productivity, for manufacturing company

Philip Morris International (PMI), a global tobacco company with over 77,000 employees and operations in about 160 countries, consolidated its IT from three regional data centers into a private-cloud setup in Switzerland. The move caused severe WAN latency for mission-critical apps (SharePoint, CIFS, MAPI), slowing file access for users—particularly in Asia and Latin America—and preventing deployment of a new marketing collaboration tool.

After evaluating major vendors, PMI piloted and chose Riverbed, deploying 140 Steelhead appliances plus Central Management Console and Interceptor across 90+ sites. The Riverbed solution delivered a 5x improvement in application performance and a 2x reduction in bandwidth use, restoring user productivity and enabling the private-cloud consolidation to succeed.

Philip Morris International (PMI)

Nigel Larkin

principal telecom architect