Does Telework...Work???

 

     Dear readers, my name is Boris Kilimnik and I'm the Channel Sales Engineer for Riverbed Federal.  I've decided to create this blog in order to provide my own personal perspective on Riverbed, its technology, and  ways to provide GREAT value to our customers while helping them save money, especially in todays tough economy.

     The Telework Exchange is promoting Telework Week this quarter during March 5th - 9th.  The concept sounds great…work from home during the week, which will save time, money, and the environment.  In fact, "During Telework Week 2011, nearly 40,000 pledged, saving $2,730,229 on commuting costs, gaining back 148,692 hours into their day, and removing 1,818 tons of pollutants from the air, while refraining from driving 3,764,001 miles" (http://teleworkexchange.com/teleworkweek/).  What the article fails to mention is the darker side of working from home…more specifically how much slower enterprise applications perform across the WAN compared to the LAN in the office.  Suddenly e-mail starts timing out, CIFS or file sharing becomes unusable, database performance comes to a grinding halt, you get the point…so yes, telework sounds great on paper but it does come with some serious challenges that need to be addressed in order to make "telework" a reality for the federal market.

     Obviously Riverbed is here to save the day…why else would I be writing this blog post???  However, before I tell you about our telework solution and how a large Federal customer, keep reading to find out who, is using our solution to provide optimization to over 12,000 employees working from home, I will tell you a short story about something that truly surprised me when I joined Riverbed.

     When I received my laptop during my first week at Riverbed, the first thing I noticed was a little "r" icon by the clock.  This was the Steelhead Mobile Client, which I learned is loaded on every single laptop for every employee in the company.  If you have no idea what the Steelhead Mobile Client is then PLEASE e-mail your Riverbed Rep ASAP, but essentially it is the same technology that is in every Steelhead appliance but packaged as a software that runs in the background of any Windows or Apple computer to provide WAN Optimization directly to the desktop/laptop.  At that point I realized that at Riverbed we don't just create and sell WAN Optimization technology but we use it internally and benefit from it as well.  How many of our competitors sales reps use their own mobile client on their laptops?  I guarantee you the answer is none.  At Riverbed we eat our own dog food, and that allows us to confidently go into any account and talk about the virtues of our mobile solution since we use it internally every single day.  Download WhitePaper-Riverbed_Relies_on_Riverbed  In fact, the screen shot below demonstrates the performance gains I have been able to realize with Steelhead Mobile on my own laptop…about a 67% reduction in total WAN data with a 3x capacity increase.  What this means is that on average I use 67% less bandwidth across the WAN, which really makes an impact when I'm traveling and am using either my iPhone, GoGo in the air, or a shared internet connection in a hotel.  Without Steelhead Mobile, applications such as Email sometimes don't work at all, especially when I'm traveling in remote locations…but with Steelhead Mobile, enterprise applications such as Email work just as fast as they do over my high speed link in the office.

     Going back to our federal customer…the customer is actually an agency within the Department of Commerce that issues patents and trademark registration.  In fact, there is even a personal side to this story.  Both of my next door neighbors are patent examiners at this agency.  About 3 weeks ago they were upgraded to new laptops with the Riverbed Steelhead Mobile Client running, and in their words, the performance difference was like night and day.  With Riverbed, all of their applications became significantly faster, which ultimately allowed them to be more efficient and expeditious in examining patent application, therefore increasing their performance and providing a significant ROI to this federal customer.

     Bottom line…telework is becoming a reality, and the only way your customers will be able to work as efficiently from home as they do from the office is by using the Steelhead Mobile Client technology from Riverbed!

-Boris Kilimnik

boris@riverbed.com