IT performance companies specializing in WAN optimization have been able to streamline business processes in a variety of industries – including the financial market.

Last week, Riverbed (News - Alert) Technology announced that the Generali Group in Poland has deployed 20 Riverbed(R) Steelhead(R) appliances and Steelhead Mobile across its operations to improve employee collaboration and productivity.


Generali Group is a fairly substantial financial and insurance group. In Europe, Generali occupies the third ranked position in terms of gross premiums written.

With Riverbed’s solutions in place, Generali has experienced up to an 80 percent reduction in the time taken to access applications over the wide area network (WAN). Prior to the Riverbed deployment, users could sometimes wait for an hour to access documents; with Riverbed deployed, they can now collaborate on files in as little as seconds, which has resulted in increased employee productivity.

Now, these same users will experience the benefits of WAN optimization.

But Generali isn’t the only financial company harnessing the power of an optimized network for success.

FinComún, one of Mexico’s micro-finance institutions, recently harnessed the power of Expand Networks’ (News - Alert) WAN accelerator solutions – leading to advanced WAN optimization.

Adolfo Quiroz, IT manager at FinComún explained why this adaption was such a crucial step: “It’s vital that branch productivity is optimal because that’s where our customers open new accounts and generate payments and loans. All customer procedures that are in the branches are directly related to the main data center at headquarters, and we found 128 kbps connections for our branch offices was simply not sufficient.”

After adapting Expand’s solutions, Adolfo said, “The Expand solution provided the best technical performance for accelerating our critical applications and SP@CNET provided a highly-professional team of engineers. On top of this, the solution offered a return on investment of just 6 months, meaning the technology would practically pay for itself.”

The savings in performance and productivity are set to be incorporated over a period of 3 years (do not forget to factor in the significant monthly savings garnished from FinComún’s bandwidth rental). So far, with Expand’s accelerators in place, employee productivity has increased dramatically and application response times have been significantly reduced.

A financial company would know best about returns on investment – so it certainly says something when they choose to purchase WAN optimization and acceleration services.


Erin Monda recently graduated from W.C.S.U. with a degree in professional writing. She primarily writes about network technologies, including cloud computing, virtualization and network optimization, however she also has a focus on E911 technologies and legislation.

Edited by Erin Monda