Institution for Savings

Institution for Savings – Riverbed WAN Optimization

“Working with Broadleaf has allowed Institution for Savings to provide LAN-like performance over the WAN. We are seeing up to a 5x improvement in throughput. The Riverbed solution has led to better control over data as well as a better experience for the end user.” Thomas Hopp, VP of IT at Institution for Savings.

Established in 1820, the Institution for Savings is widely recognized as one of the oldest and most stable mutual banks in the country, with assets totaling approximately $1 billion.923 million. It is also the largest mutual savings bank in the Greater Newburyport region and the third largest on the North Shore of Massachusetts. In recent years, the Institution for Savings has made significant strides to expand its market. In 2006, it opened its first ever full-service banking office outside of Newburyport, in the heart of Salisbury Square. This office is flourishing, and in 2007 was named Business of the Year by the Salisbury Chamber of Commerce and was also named one of the Top Places to Work in Massachusetts by The Boston Globe in 2008. After the bank merged with the Ipswich Co-operative Bank, it now had a footprint of five full service offices in Newburyport, Ipswich, Salisbury and Rowley.

Due to the collaboration among offices, challenges of working across the WAN (wide area network) became a bottleneck as central IT resources needed to be accessed from the multiple branches. To facilitate employees working more effectively, this bank needed faster access times for various applications such as Exchange email, Microsoft Office files (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) and their Core Banking System (TCP based).

It was quickly realized that Riverbed Steelhead appliances would provide an optimal solution to meet Institution for Savings’ needs. Riverbed products accelerate the broadest range of applications that are critical to business. They make IT infrastructure consolidation effective. File, email and application servers can be run from a main office without sacrificing performance for branch workers. The simplicity of the Steelhead appliances further enhance the benefit of this solution. The appliances deploy in minutes without changes to applications, users, routers, or other IT infrastructure. The appliances are also scalable so that they can grow with the business and thus provide investment protection.

Working with Tom Hopp, VP of Information Technology, Broadleaf helped size and deploy the Riverbed Steelhead appliances. The Steelhead appliances almost immediately returned about 70% bandwidth utilization reduction and greatly enhanced the end-user experience by allowing for LAN-like performance at the branch locations.