Case Study: Swiss Post achieves 4x faster application performance and 65% WAN traffic reduction with Riverbed SteelHead

Swiss Post - Customer Case Study

Swiss Post, Switzerland’s national postal service with about 61,428 employees and 3,600 drop-off points, set out to centralize its IT by collapsing dozens of local servers into a smaller number of central servers. After removing roughly 80 local servers and consolidating into 12 central systems, employees began experiencing severe WAN-related delays when accessing CIFS/HTTP-based ERP and other applications, hurting productivity and customer service.

To fix this, Swiss Post deployed over 200 Riverbed SteelHead appliances and a Central Management Console to accelerate and optimize traffic. The solution delivered up to 4x faster application performance, reduced WAN usage to about 35% of previous levels (a 65% reduction) with CIFS traffic cut ~75%, and cut app access times from about six minutes to roughly 40 seconds—restoring productivity, improving customer service, and enabling further IT consolidation.

Swiss Post