Willis Group Holdings Limited has selected Riverbed (News - Alert) Technology to enable IT consolidation.

 

Willis, a global insurance broker delivering professional insurance, reinsurance, risk management, financial and human resource consulting, and actuarial services to institutions around the world, has deployed over 100 Riverbed Steelhead appliances.

 

Willis has more than 300 offices in 100 countries, with a global team of approximately 16,000 employees serving clients in 190 countries.

 

The Riverbed deployment has enabled Willis to consolidate its IT infrastructure, with anticipated savings of $30 million over five years, while improving access to information for its global workforce.

 

Riverbed WDS solutions enable organizations of all sizes to overcome a host of severe problems, including poor application performance and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites. By speeding the performance of applications between data centers, remote offices and mobile workers by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times, the Riverbed Steelhead WDS products enable companies to consolidate IT, improve backup and replication processes to ensure data integrity, and improve staff productivity and collaboration.

 

Steelhead products have been deployed in organizations ranging from the world's largest corporations with offices around the globe to small companies with a couple of sites that are just miles apart

 

To date, Willis has deployed more than 100 Steelhead appliances and two Interceptors, which enables large numbers of Steelhead appliances to work together, optimizing up to one million connections, and allowing for real-time addition or removal of appliances within a group.

 

The implementation went smoothly, without requiring significant changes to Willis's existing network.

 

"We didn't have to dramatically change or reinvest in anything, like Cisco (News - Alert) equipment or any other equipment," said Eoghan Doyle, director of infrastructure and Operations. "Essentially, the appliances worked out of the box."

 

The performance improvements have been dramatic, with LAN-like application performance over the WAN, peak data reduction of 82 percent, and a capacity increase of 4.2x. The most significant benefit of the Riverbed solution has been Willis's ability to consolidate its technology infrastructure, while allowing remote workers to collaborate seamlessly.

The Riverbed appliances have also become a key element of Willis' strategy for smaller international offices, allowing the company to consolidate branch infrastructure with no performance hit to its end-users.

 

In a number of international offices where latency is high, Willis was able to remove all e-mail servers, local file servers, and Citrix-based applications. In many of these offices, a small print server is the only server remaining in the office.

 

"An increasing amount of our international offices no longer need local IT professionals or significant local infrastructure," added Doyle.