Riverbed Technology, the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced that Zain Iraq, a mobile phone operator in Iraq managed by the Zain group, has purchased and deployed Riverbed® Steelhead® appliances at 75 sites throughout Iraq and in other Middle East locations to accelerate, consolidate and expand its operations.
Zain Iraq is committed to contributing to the economic prosperity of Iraq by creating employment and business opportunities for Iraqi citizens. Zain Iraq currently has nearly 8 million customers who rely on the company to provide them with secure, affordable, always-on cellular service. Zain Iraq was formed in January 2008 after Zain Group purchased Iraqna, and merged it with its existing Iraqi operator MTC Atheer. Iraqna and MTC Atheer have been providing to customers a wide range of mobile telephony and data services since December 2003.
Zain Iraq’s parent company, Zain Group, has set a goal to become one of the top ten leading telecom companies by 2011, with a goal of 150 million customers. As part of that effort, the company has launched its ACE (Accelerate, Consolidate, Expand) initiative. ACE seeks to extract superior value from existing assets through three main thrusts: accelerating growth in Africa; consolidating existing assets; and expanding into adjacent markets. Zain’s acquisition of Iraqna is part of that effort.
To meet the ACE goal of consolidating existing assets, Zain Iraq has been re-architected to minimize operational expense, consolidating certain activities and services to improve data security, reduce IT overhead and improve overall back-end operations. Consolidated
activities include disaster recovery, revenue assurance, fraud monitoring and access to Exchange servers. As Zain Iraq consolidated these operations with its recent acquisition of Iraqna, the company recognized that reliable and fast transfer of data and voice between branches, data centers, call centers and regional customer care offices would be critical for the success of the project.
Prior to the acquisition, Zain had been using a fiber link to transfer billing and other data to its data center for processing. However, according to Riad Mounir, IT director at Zain Iraq, “We had difficulty sending information. The security situation prevented us from expanding the fiber network, but to ensure timely billing and security of our data, we needed to replicate customer usage info on an hourly basis. Our existing fiber link couldn’t handle the load so we shifted all data to our satellite and microwave links. Latency and limited bandwidth were both constraints.”
Zain Iraq worked with its partner, FutureTech, a Kuwait-based solutions provider, to identify and implement a WDS solution that would ensure fast response times for applications and data in this consolidated and bandwidth-constrained environment.
When asked about the selection process, Mounir confirmed that, “Working closely with FutureTech, we considered offerings from Cisco, Juniper, and Riverbed. We chose Riverbed over the competition because of its proven leadership in the marketplace combined with its ability to deliver superior acceleration and bandwidth optimization.”
Riverbed has enabled Zain Iraq to realize its goals of centralization of assets, while providing field employees with real-time access to secure applications and data. Zain Iraq is now able to meet its business goal of replicating billing data hourly, while response times for applications such as Exchange and databases have improved by 20X.
The Steelhead appliances have also increased the capacity of the network by 3-4X, depending on the location. For example, the link between Basra and Baghdad is now able to carry four times the traffic that it could prior to the installation of the Steelhead
appliances. This capacity increase has improved quality assurance for voice and video conferencing by allowing Zain Iraq to dedicate bandwidth for these critical applications.
According to Mounir, the increased capacity delivered by the Steelhead appliances has also resulted in significant cost savings for Zain Iraq. “Without Riverbed, we would have had to make a substantial investment in bandwidth. I estimate that we are saving an average of USD 144,000 per month by working with Riverbed. We’ve seen a return on investment of seven months.”
“We continue to see demand for Riverbed solutions from customers in the Middle East, with telecommunications providers choosing Riverbed to accelerate their applications and data,” said Mohammed Anwar Karzazi, regional director at Riverbed. “Our strong market presence and technology leadership, coupled with our ability to deliver 24X7 follow-the-sun customer support, are particularly attractive to customers who demand best-of-breed solutions and always-on performance.”
Steelhead Products
Riverbed WDS solutions enable organizations of all sizes to overcome a host of severe problems, including poor application performance and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites. By speeding the performance of applications between data centers, remote offices and mobile workers by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times, the Riverbed award-winning Steelhead WDS products enable companies to consolidate IT, improve backup and replication processes to ensure data integrity, and improve staff productivity and collaboration. Steelhead products have been deployed in organizations ranging from the world’s largest corporations with offices around the globe to small companies with a couple of sites that are just miles apart. To learn more, view Riverbed’s demo: www.riverbed.com/pr/jack.
Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed's products and services, and statements relating to Riverbed’s ability to meet the needs of distributed organizations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our
ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed’s business are set forth in our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on July 29, 2008. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Any future product, feature or related specification that may be referenced in this release are for information purposes only and are not commitments to deliver any technology or enhancement. Riverbed reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time.
About FutureTech
FutureTech provides best-in-class solutions and consulting services in enterprise storage, intelligent network, enterprise security, and application security. FutureTech has developed expertise in introducing innovative infrastructure solutions that intelligently tackle the challenging issues that face current business users such as secured remote access (VPN), ESSO and authentication management, application performance acceleration, and data center optimization through virtualization and consolidation.
FutureTech helps clients across a variety of industries, including banking and finance, telecom, service provider, and energy, to achieve their objectives. Clients include Zain Telcom, Celtel Telcom, Agility Logistics, and KEO Engineering firm.
About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS) solutions for companies worldwide. By enabling application performance over the wide area network (WAN) that is orders of magnitude faster than what users experience today, Riverbed is changing the way people work, and enabling a distributed workforce that can collaborate as if they were local. Additional information about Riverbed is available at www.riverbed.com.
Riverbed Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead, RiOS, Interceptor, and the Riverbed logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
About Zain
Zain is a leading emerging markets player in the field of telecommunications aiming to become one of the top ten mobile operators in the world by 2011. Zain was established in 1983 in Kuwait as the region's first mobile operator. Since 2003, it has grown significantly becoming the 4th largest mobile network in the world in terms of geographic presence with a footprint in 22 countries spread across the Middle East and Africa providing mobile voice and data services to 56.3 million active customers (as at 30 September 2008).
Zain operates in the following countries: Bahrain, Burkina Faso, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Malawi, Madagascar, Niger, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. In Lebanon, the company manages the network on behalf of the government operating as mtc-
touch. The company's mobile operations in Ghana will begin by the end of 2008.
The Zain brand is wholly owned by Mobile Telecommunications Company KSC, which is listed on the Kuwait Stock Exchange (Stock ticker: ZAIN). The company had a market capitalization of over $23.4bn on 30 September, 2008.
