Anderson Eckstein & Westrick, Inc. (AEW) is a full-service engineering and consulting firm, providing service in civil engineering, surveying, architecture, and geographic information systems for over 40 years.  AEW's experience includes the design of roads, bridges, schools, commercial centers, utility infrastructure, parks, bike paths, and industrial facilities.  AEW is a multi-office firm headquartered in Shelby Township, Michigan.

In late 2005, AEW began a process of trying to consolidate data from their remote offices back to their corporate headquarters.  In consolidating data, AEW was also looking to reduce infrastructure costs by removing remote office servers, and consolidating the tape backup process to a single backup at the corporate office.  Initial attempts to consolidate data were unsuccessful, as remote office AutoCAD users, in particular, would have to wait several minutes to open an AutoCAD drawing across their point to point T1 connection.

In January, 2006, AEW began a Proof of Concept with Riverbed's WAN accelerators.  When the remote office users were informed that data would be consolidated back to the data center again, a small revolt occurred, based on the poor performance from previous attempts to accomplish this without the Riverbed solution.  To alleviate this anxiety, data was moved to the corporate office and drives were re-mapped to access the information from the corporate server, but the remote office servers were left in place.  The remote office users believed they were accessing their information from the remote server, when in fact they were accessing from the corporate office without any noticeable speed difference.

With the success of the Riverbed solution, AEW was able to consolidate all data back to the corporate office, remove remote office servers and backups, and reduce I.T management costs associated with supporting remote office infrastructure.  Terri Dedischew, corporate I.T Manager, states, "The Riverbed technology was the perfect solution to address our issues".  Since 2006, AEW has also implemented the Steelhead Mobile solution, for executives who frequently travel or work remotely, but still need high-speed access over a VPN connection to their data at the corporate office.

"The ability to test this solution under a Proof of Concept was very important to us", states Terri, "simply based on the poor experience we'd had when trying to consolidate the data without the Riverbed devices from before.  We just didn't believe it would work".

AEW was one of the first A/E/C firms in Michigan to deploy the Riverbed solution, and offers a high recommendation on the technology.