Case Study: Sealed Air achieves 63% WAN traffic reduction and $900K annual savings with Riverbed Steelhead appliances

Sealed Air Reduces WAN Traffic 63% with Riverbed Steelhead Appliances

Sealed Air, a global manufacturer of protective and food-packaging solutions operating in more than 50 countries with over 160 sites, was facing rising WAN bandwidth costs and widespread complaints about slow application response times. Remote offices with limited bandwidth and high latency struggled to support growing volumes of email, HTTP, daily replications and Lotus Notes traffic, forcing the company to choose between costly bandwidth upgrades or reducing network traffic.

Sealed Air deployed nearly 130 Riverbed Steelhead appliances worldwide in about six months, using preconfigured units for easy remote installation and implementing traffic classes to prioritize mission‑critical apps like VoIP and SAP. The appliances cut WAN data volume by 63% (yielding a 2.77x effective bandwidth increase), eliminated the need to ship large 400 MB graphics files, enabled hour‑level file delivery SLAs, delivered full ROI in under 14 months, and produced roughly $900,000 in annual savings while dramatically improving application performance and user satisfaction.

Sealed Air

Jean Michel Ricard

Manager of Global Network Services