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Riverbed SteelHead Enables IAT Group Employees to Write Insurance Policies Four Times Faster Whether in the Office or the FieldRiverbed (News - Alert) Technology (NASDAQ:RVBD), the leader in application performance infrastructure, today announced that IAT Group is using Riverbed® SteelHead™ to help its insurance agents and field investigators work more efficiently with their most important software application, Vertafore's ImageRight, an insurance management system. Agents can now complete tasks such as writing policies, which took 90 minutes to two hours or more because of slow access and delivery over the wide area network (WAN), in 30 minutes or less. Because of such productivity improvements, as well as cost-savings, IAT Group realized a return on investment (ROI) of ten months with its SteelHead deployment. Tweet This: Riverbed #SteelHead enables IAT Group to write insurance policies 4x faster in the office or the field: http://rvbd.ly/1ykhzJ7 Headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, IAT Group has 18 offices around the United States and operates three large data centers in Omaha, Raleigh, and a suburb of Chicago, where software applications have been centralized. Business critical applications used by IAT Group include Verafore's ImageRight, AS/400, AcroSoft and Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange. ImageRight, housed in the Omaha data center and run on AS/400 servers, did not perform well for IAT Group when the application was first centralized. "The AS/400 is not network friendly. It's very chatty," explained Ryan Smith, a network engineer at IAT Group. "It used to take some underwriters up to two hours to write a policy and most of that time was spent waiting for the system to transmit information." IAT Group researched WAN optimization solutions and found that SteelHead was "ahead of all the competitors." The company purchased SteelHead appliances for its larger branch offices as well as the company's data centers. IAT Group also purchased SteelHead Mobile for field investigators who work remotely. SteelHead compresses ImageRight data by u to 99% to achieve such a level of application acceleration. "It's now a dream to use AS/400 across the WAN, and we're doing business more efficiently," said Smith. Before the SteelHead deployment, IAT Group employees accepted the slow WAN and therefore slow application performance as unavoidable. "I think a lot of people here just had an acceptance of poor performing technology," explained Smith. "We've reaped the benefits for all the other WAN-enabled software and the investigators have seen a big difference," said Smith. Other employees have benefitted as well, such as an SQL database administer who does a lot of copying of CIFS files between his home and his office at headquarters. His copying tasks used to take hours, but now take a few minutes. Another employee, who uses Information Builders (News - Alert) WebFOCUS to analyze data on the AS/400s, finds that jobs that previously took several hours to run are now completed in minutes. "Two years after the initial deployment, we are still amazed by what great products these are," said Smith. "The benefits are tremendous." Riverbed SteelHead and the Riverbed Application Performance Platform™ Riverbed SteelHead is the industry's #1 WAN optimization solution that helps IT ensure optimal service levels for applications among data centers, branch locations, cloud networks, and end users. SteelHead, further, allows IT to prioritize delivery of mission-critical applications over the best available network with customized per-application service level agreements (SLAs). SteelHead pioneered WAN optimization in 2004 with unique innovations for application, transport, and data streamlining across the WAN and Internet to deliver the best end-user experience regardless of location while dramatically reducing network bandwidth costs. With SteelHead, enterprise and SaaS (News - Alert) applications can be delivered up to 33x faster while using 97% less bandwidth. Riverbed SteelHead is part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform™, the most complete platform for the hybrid enterprise to ensure applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed, and performance issues can be proactively detected and resolved before impacting business performance. Connect with Riverbed About Riverbed Riverbed, at more than $1 billion in annual revenue, is the leader in Application Performance Infrastructure, delivering the most complete platform for the hybrid enterprise to ensure applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed, and performance issues can be proactively detected and resolved before impacting business performance. Riverbed enables hybrid enterprises to transform application performance into a competitive advantage by maximizing employee productivity and leveraging IT to create new forms of operational agility. Riverbed's 25,000+ customers include 97% of both the Fortune 100 and Forbes Global 100. Learn more at www.riverbed.com. Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logo used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners.
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