HP brings Tatts Group to Riverbed

Lotteries and gaming company has Riverbed's Steelhead appliances implemented into its network by HP.

A media representative for Riverbed told CRN HP signed the deal and provided the initial implementation. It will also provide training and services of the product.

Tatts Group encompasses business such as Pokies, Tatts Lotteries, Unitab Wagering and Maxgaming. It's also one of Australia's key providers of poker machines, lotteries, gaming and wagering services.

Anthony Prior, communication systems manager at Tatts Group, said it had head offices in many states, after acquiring several companies and their associated IT infrastructure.

As a result, staff spread throughout Australia needed 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," he said.

 "But our staff needed to be able to access these critical applications from all over the country.

"Remote users regularly complained about application performance - we knew we had a real problem."
 
Adding WAN bandwidth would have been expensive and would not have solved the real problem of slow application performance, said Prior.

"The Riverbed Steelhead appliances have made our key applications run four times faster across our WAN, while using much less bandwidth than before," he said.

 "This has allowed us to realize IT cost savings by halving our interstate WAN capacity, from 4 Mbps to only 2 Mbps."