Teneo enables 75% reduction in data traffic and bandwidth usage across global law firm Rouse & Co

Published on: 23 June 2008

Teneo has helped one of the world’s leading intellectual property law firms Rouse & Co to cut its HTTP, SMTP and MAPI data traffic by an average of 75 per cent through installation of Riverbed Steelhead Appliances in nine of its 17 offices worldwide, all managed centrally through the Riverbed Central Management Console (CMC) from the company’s headquarters in London Docklands.

Rouse & Co was experiencing major issues delivering key centralised applications to PCs in many of its offices around the world. Applications which included PMS, CRM, Trade Mark DB, SharePoint 2007, Workflow and Billing were all being delivered via Citrix to desktops. But with bandwidth availability choked to as low as 512 kbps (kilo bits per second) at a 1:4 contention in some outlying offices, staff were experiencing increasing data latency issues, waiting several minutes for applications to arrive on the desktop and save changes – impacting productivity negatively in many offices.

Before selecting Teneo and Riverbed, Rouse & Co’s global IT director, Jonathan Bruce, investigated increasing local bandwidth but discovered that an expensive 200 per cent bandwidth increase would have been needed to cope with projected data traffic levels to reduce latency to acceptable levels in many offices.

So Bruce agreed to conduct a pilot of Riverbed working with Teneo. Teneo deployed one Riverbed appliance in Rouse & Co’s Jakarta office and a second in London.

“The pilot took just one day to deploy and we experienced an immediate increase in network performance which kept our users happy. Four months later we rolled this solution out to eight further offices. We were able to use the Riverbed CMC to get a global view of the progress of the roll out. It also highlighted any issues as the roll out progressed. This kind of visibility made the roll out smooth – it was fantastic.”

Initial results are impressive. Rouse & Co has been able to accelerate its plans to centralise and consolidate IT management and infrastructure while simultaneously coping with a seven fold increase in data capacity usage and six fold increase in file sharing across the organisation over the last two years, all whilst actually increasing speed of application delivery to the desktop. Bruce also reports that the Riverbed appliances have really helped when using applications such as Microsoft SharePoint 2007, which the business uses extensively for document management.

Bruce added:
“We are very grateful to Teneo for helping us achieve such as smooth rollout of this WAN optimisation solution. Riverbed Steelhead & CMC proved to be the ideal solution to a growing problem which stood in the way of our centralisation plans and was negatively impacting productivity.”

James Hall, head of marketing and operations, Teneo Limited, summed up:
“Rouse & Co has gained significant cost, productivity and IT management advantages by opting for the Riverbed solution. Our figures show that the firm was able to achieve a 75 per cent reduction in data traffic across its WAN which enabled it to forge ahead with plans to centralise application provision and data storage while improving speed of delivery of data between its offices all over the world.”