Speedier SharePoint for Tatts Group

June 17, 2009:Australia-wide access to SharePoint and other enterprise applications at gambilng giant Tatts Group has been given a major boost with the deployment of Riverbed Steelhead appliances at three locations in Australia.

Encompassing businesses such as Tatts Pokies, Tatts Lotteries, Unitab Wagering and Maxgaming, Tatts Group is one of Australia’s key providers of poker machines, lotteries, gaming and wagering services. The Tatts Group has acquired a number of other organizations over the past few years and now has over 2,000 staff located across Australia.

Anthony Prior, Communication Systems Manager at Tatts Group, says that after acquiring several companies and their associated IT infrastructure, Tatts Group now has head offices for various businesses located in many states; as a result, staff spread throughout Australia now need 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 centers. But our staff need to access these critical applications from all over the country,” Prior explains. “Remote users regularly complained about application performance - we knew we had a real problem.”

Instead of spending more money on WAN bandwidth, Tatts Group decided to look for a WAN optimization solution. That decision, Prior points out, was “far more cost effective and, unlike a bandwidth upgrade, would not only solve congestion problems, but would also overcome network and application latency.” The company selected Riverbed and saw a return on investment (ROI) six months after deploying the Riverbed Steelhead appliances at its Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney sites.

“Adding WAN bandwidth would have been expensive and would not have solved the real problem of slow application performance,” Prior explains. “The Riverbed Steelhead appliances have made our key applications run four times faster across our WAN, while using much less bandwidth than before,” Prior says. “This has allowed us to realize significant IT cost savings by halving our interstate WAN capacity, from 4 Mbps to only 2 Mbps. But to our users it certainly doesn’t feel like we did that – they see everything running much faster than before. Better yet, the level of user complaints about application performance has dropped markedly.”

Before making a decision, Tatts Group tested products from various vendors. Riverbed was chosen due to the simplicity, scalability and performance of its products.

“The Riverbed Steelhead appliances are easier to configure and perform better than the others tested,” says Prior. “In addition, the Riverbed solution is highly scalable. This is important for us as we’re planning to deploy the Steelhead appliances in other state capitals, including Adelaide and Darwin.”

Prior says the installation, undertaken by Riverbed and HP, was trouble-free, with all products installed quickly and immediately working smoothly.

“The Riverbed Steelhead appliances worked as promised and the installation was effortless - which was very impressive given the benefits they deliver. Now that they’re deployed, the Steelhead appliances are simple to use,” he explains.

“Deployment of WAN optimization products from Riverbed has been a major success for us – boosting our network performance while saving the company money,” concludes Prior.

The Steelhead appliances have 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.