Tatts wagers on Riverbed to deliver IT services

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 16 June 2009 17:14

Business IT - Technology

Lotteries and gaming operator, Tatts Group, has put some of its money into improving the performance of its IT systems, deploying IT infrastructure performance services group, Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances at three locations in Australia.

Communication systems manager at Tatts Group, Anthony Prior, said today that after acquiring several companies and their associated IT infrastructure, Tatts Group now had head offices for various businesses located in many states, and as a result, staff spread throughout Australia now needed 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 centralised servers located in our Brisbane and Melbourne data centres. But our staff need to access these critical applications from all over the country.

“Remote users regularly complained about application performance - we knew we had a real problem.”

Riverbed’s Steve Dixon claimed the company’s Steelhead appliances had 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.

And, according to Anthony Prior, instead of spending more money on WAN bandwidth, Tatts Group decided to look for a WAN optimisation solution. That decision, Prior says, was “far more cost effective and, unlike a bandwidth upgrade, would not only solve congestion problems, but would also overcome network and application latency.”

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