This was all achieved after Brewin Dolphin had consolidated 37 branch office servers into one central head office data centre.

Teneo, a leading specialist application performance management solutions provider, has installed a total of 38 Riverbed Steelhead Wide Area Network (WAN) Accelerator units across 37 Brewin Dolphin offices serving 1500 employees across the UK.

Brewin Dolphin has recently reviewed its network infrastructure and has consolidated its individual branch servers to just one data centre. The company was keen to avoid impacting on network performance as a result of the server centralisation. It had also recently deployed Voice over IP and bandwidth hungry database and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) applications. Adding additional bandwidth looked cost prohibitive and would not overcome network latency; Brewin Dolphin wanted to explore WAN acceleration and application performance solutions.

After investigating several solutions, Brewin Dolphin engaged with Teneo, who recommended a trial of Riverbed's Steelhead appliances at the main data centre and one branch office. Network traffic reduced on average by 55% with no application compatibility issues or network performance drops.

Stuart Christie, head of networks at Brewin Dolphin Securities commented: "End user feedback from the trial was extremely positive and network performance improved dramatically. Teneo supplied 38 Riverbed Steelhead appliances across all our offices within 4 weeks. All units were pre-configured by Teneo before shipping, making it simple for our branch IT engineers to complete the installation."

All of the Riverbed Steelhead appliances are managed by Brewin Dolphin through the Riverbed Central Management Console, a web-based interface allowing network administrators to deploy and configure each appliance and to see how applications are performing across the WAN.

James Hall, head of marketing and operations at Teneo, summarised: "For many organisations it is optimamal application performance that is so critical, and this is precisely the area that Brewin Dolphin focused on. It can be frustrating to invest in more and more bandwidth and still not achieve any improvement in performance. We are delighted that Brewin Dolphin has achieved such dramatic results for their network by deploying Riverbed Steelhead appliances, and especially happy that their employees can see the difference on their desktops and laptops."