Case Study: Shelf Drilling achieves faster remote application performance and improved operational efficiency with Riverbed

Shelf Drilling improves user experience and boosts operational efficiency across remote locations with Riverbed

Shelf Drilling is a Dubai‑headquartered shallow‑water drilling company operating 30 rigs across eight countries with about 3,000 employees. Rigs rely on geostationary VSAT links with limited bandwidth (1–2 Mbps) and high latency (up to 750 ms), which caused slow performance for critical apps (ERP, file sharing, cloud replication) and strained crew communications and routine operations.

Shelf Drilling deployed Riverbed SteelHead and Riverbed SaaS Accelerator integrated with VMware, JD Edwards and Microsoft 365, plus on‑prem virtual environments to optimize replication and local availability. The result: intranet traffic cut by up to 95%, SaaS Accelerator and app optimizations of around 80% (JD Edwards 81%) with a 95% reduction in database replication traffic, >50% compression on 1.2 TB of email and ~67% less monitoring traffic—delivering better user experience, streamlined rig operations and stronger business continuity for cloud migration.

Shelf Drilling

Mohammed Al Baqari

Network and Information Security Manager