22 Riverbed Steelhead Appliances for Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced that Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego (BGK) has deployed 22 Riverbed’ Steelhead appliances across its branches in Poland, as well as Steelhead Mobile on the laptops of its mobile employees, which has allowed the company to reduce operational costs by centralizing its IT infrastructure to one location.

The Riverbed solution has also reduced bandwidth utilization by 98 percent.

BGK is the only state bank in Poland, with 27 offices and approximately 1,400 employees. BGK focuses primarily on supporting government socio-economic programs and programs related to regional development using public funds. The bank also has a commercial operation that focuses on services to public-sector institutions, including local government and state-run companies.

BGK wanted to centralize its IT infrastructure to one location and provide video conferencing facilities for staff across its distributed offices. As Artus Jarosz, head of technology at BGK, explains, "With 27 office locations to oversee we wanted to reduce the cost and time taken to manage our data, as well as provide remote workers with improved access to company information. However, we knew that moving from a local area network (LAN) to a wide area network (WAN) would result in poor application performance and we were keen to avoid this scenario."

BGK chose the Riverbed WAN optimization solution, as it offered the most comprehensive solution for addressing the needs of the data center, remote offices and mobile workers.

"Since installing the Steelhead products, we’ve been able to move to a centralized IT infrastructure without affecting application performance, and with Steelhead Mobile we can now offer our remote workers the same quick access to data as our office-based employees," says Jarosz. "In addition, some areas of Poland still suffer from poor network connections. Users in these locations have seen the greatest improvement in download speeds. Overall, the Riverbed solution has delivered a number of benefits, from cost savings associated with managing branch offices to improved user productivity."

With bandwidth utilization reduced by 98 percent, and a centralized IT infrastructure in place, BGK now plans to install a video conferencing solution to enable even greater employee collaboration.