Petrobras Deploys Riverbed Equip on Oil Platforms

While Stone Fox Capital has never been that big about investing in a stock based on individual customer deals, this win by Riverbed (RVBD) made us take notice. Petrobras (PBR) has become the global leader in oil exploration and one of the most respected companies in the world. The Deepwater oil that they've found recently has set off a huge capital expansion program into Deepwater drilling. For them to use RVBD Steelhead appliances on 40 Off-Shore Oil platforms is worth noting. The data collected from these platforms is mission critical and they'd likely spare all costs to find the best equipment around. They chose RVBD over likely competition from Cisco (CSCO) and all others in the industry and alternative sources of just hooking up more bandwidth. Best of Breed companies typically used Best of Breed vendors. RVBD has clearly set themselves apart from the competition.

RVBD has been a favorite stock in our Growth Portfolio going back into 2008. They continue to shine and show every reason that this company will continue to grow and prosper. The stock continues to trade along the 52 week high and should be bought on all pullbacks.

From the press release:

• Working closely with Decatron, an integrator versed in the implementation and support of Riverbed solutions and related consulting services, Petrobras deployed 43 Steelhead® appliances: 40 on the offshore platforms and three on the continent. The Petrobras IT organization also uses the Riverbed Central Management Console (CMC) for the configuration, upgrade and monitoring of these appliances. According to Lage, Petrobras deployed Riverbed WAN optimization rather than investing in expensive infrastructure, such as optical fiber undersea connecting offshore data to continent systems.

• After installing the Riverbed appliances, the backup window for the offshore oil-drilling platforms, which had reached 34 hours, was reduced to an average of four hours. This reduction released significant bandwidth for end-users to conduct day-to-day operations, such as accessing remote data and applications and audio-conferencing.
• Lage tested several WAN optimization offerings and chose Riverbed over its competitors because the Riverbed solution provided acceleration capabilities designed for not only improving end-user performance, but also accelerating the replication and backup of large amounts of data.
• On average, after installing the Riverbed solution, WAN traffic was reduced by 65%, freeing bandwidth for routine daily activities. The combination of the reduction in WAN traffic, QoS and Riverbed's ability to overcome network and application latency has given remote users LAN-like application performance.