Australia's Tatts Group Selects Riverbed Steelhead Appliances

Tatts Group, a wagering, gaming and lottery operator, has selected and deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances at three locations in Australia.

 

Riverbed (News - Alert) officials claimed that the Steelhead appliances have made the Tatts Group's key IT applications run up to four times faster, improving employee productivity and saving the company considerable IT infrastructure costs.

 

Encompassing businesses such as Tatts Pokies, Tatts Lotteries, Unitab Wagering and Maxgaming, Tatts Group is one of Australia's key providers of poker machines, lotteries, gaming and wagering services.

 

 The Tatts Group has acquired a number of other organizations over the past few years, and now has more than 2,000 staff members located across Australia.

 

Anthony Prior, communication systems manager at Tatts Group, says that after acquiring several companies and their associated IT infrastructure, Tatts Group now has head offices for various businesses located in many states; as a result, staff spread throughout Australia now need to access more data and run more applications, both local and remote.

 

"Many of our main corporate IT applications, such as Sharepoint, and our finance and HR packages are run on centralized servers located in our Brisbane and Melbourne data centers. But our staff need to access these critical applications from all over the country," said Prior in a statement."Remote users regularly complained about application performance—we knew we had a real problem."

 

Instead of spending more money on WAN bandwidth, Tatts Group decided to look for a WAN optimization solution.

 

The company selected Riverbed and saw a return on investment (ROI) six months after deploying the Riverbed Steelhead appliances at its Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney sites.

 

Prior said that adding WAN bandwidth would have been expensive and would not have solved the real problem of slow application performance. He said that the Riverbed Steelhead appliances have made the company’s key applications run four times faster across the WAN, while using much less bandwidth than before.

 

This, Prior said, has allowed the company to realize significant IT cost savings by halving the interstate WAN capacity, from 4 Mbps to only 2 Mbps.

 

“For to our users it certainly doesn't feel like we did that -- they see everything running much faster than before,” he added. “Better yet, the level of user complaints about application performance has dropped markedly.”

 

Before making a decision, Tatts Group tested products from various vendors. Riverbed was chosen due to the simplicity, scalability and performance of its products.

Prior said that the Riverbed Steelhead appliances are easier to configure and perform better than the others tested.

 

Moreover, he said that the Riverbed solution is highly scalable.

 

“This is important for us as we are planning to deploy the Steelhead appliances in other state capitals, including Adelaide and Darwin," Prior said.

 

Riverbed Technology is the IT infrastructure performance company.

 

Earlier this month, Riverbed Technology had announced that Kendle International Inc. has selected and deployed Riverbed WAN optimization solutions.

 

Kendle deployed the Riverbed Steelhead appliances to speed performance of its centralized applications. As a result, Kendle has dramatically reduced its bandwidth utilization and increased employee productivity while reducing its overall IT infrastructure costs.