Case Study: Rouse International achieves guaranteed application performance and £200,000+ annual savings with Riverbed Steelhead appliances

Rouse Guarantees Application Performance with Riverbed Steelhead Appliances

Rouse is a global intellectual property services firm with 16 offices that began centralizing applications to a UK data center in 2004. As more business‑critical systems (intranet/MOSS, time & billing, Exchange, WebTMS) and some VoIP traffic were consolidated, its mixed broadband WAN became bandwidth‑constrained and application performance suffered — upgrading to managed MPLS links was prohibitively expensive.

Rouse deployed 13 Riverbed Steelhead appliances across 12 sites, managed centrally by Riverbed’s Central Management Console, and saw immediate results: bandwidth use fell 78% (a 4.5× capacity increase), document access became up to 34× faster with a 97% latency reduction, helpdesk calls dropped ~80%, and the company avoided costly link upgrades, saving an estimated £200,000+ per year while enabling further application centralization and improved VoIP quality.

Rouse International

Jonathan Bruce

Global Head of IT