Riverbed Technology has today announced that McCullough Robertson Lawyers, billed as Queensland’s largest law firm, has “deployed Riverbed SteelCentral Aternity to close the visibility gap between how its lawyers are experiencing applications and services, and what the IT team could previously see with its existing set of monitoring tools”.
As a result of this added visibility, we’re told that “the IT team can now proactively diagnose and resolve performance issues, improving the digital experience and enabling staff to spend more time delivering superior client service”.
For more than 90 years, McCullough Robertson Lawyers says it has “delivered trusted advice to major Australia and foreign-owned corporations, financial institutions, governments, private enterprises and high net worth individuals”, and has a “450-strong workforce spans offices in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Newcastle”.
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A bit of background illuminates that “handling urgent requests for its large volume of clients is common, and timing is critical”.
In addition, “long hours and late nights put added stresses on lawyers who simply expect technology to assist, not hinder them”.
Thus, as McCullough Robertson Laywers “continued to grapple with its ageing infrastructure, employee complaints about the performance of devices, applications and services increased – especially in offices like Sydney, located far from their centralised IT in Brisbane”.
Ron Dutta, director of IT, McCullough Robertson Lawyers, said: “We initially approached Riverbed to assist with improving the performance of our network.
“And while they proved early on they could meet that need with their WAN optimisation solution, SteelHead, we quickly learned that our lack of visibility into how users were actually experiencing apps and services was hindering performance as well – and in a major way.”
We are given one example where “it was taking a lawyer up to two minutes (with averages of around one minute) to open and send an email”.
“Existing monitoring tools told IT that all systems were running fine. McCullough Robertson Lawyers ran a proof of concept with SteelCentral Aternity and was able to verify the user issue and diagnose that it was stemming from a non-standard installation of Outlook across a large portion of the business.”
Dutta explained: “Through that one user complaint, we were able to identify that a quarter of our users were affected. To put it into perspective, we were losing about 75 hours of productivity per day on an issue our existing monitoring tools couldn’t see. Once the issue was solved, productivity spiked and levels of client-service increased across the business.”
Riverbed says: “SteelCentral Aternity extends McCullough Robertson Lawyers’ visibility into end-user experience of every enterprise app in their portfolio, running on any physical, virtual, or mobile device.”
Dutta added: “Aternity provides the insights our IT team need to understand app performance, diagnose issues and improve service levels for employees, proactively, remotely, and non-invasively. We can now troubleshoot between network and device issues at speed, and resolve issues without interfering with the productivity of our lawyers.”
Foundation for the digital age
While the implementation process is ongoing, Dutta said the system would be instrumental in enabling greater innovation at the firm, and critical in its efforts to improve efficiency and processes for the digital age.
“Lawyers don’t want to have to focus on technology – for them it’s just a mechanism to deliver to their clients more quickly,” Dutta continued.
“We are focused on launching IT projects and initiatives which allow them to simply get on with the job. But to get there, we must ensure our systems are running as efficiently as possible, and this is something that requires clear visibility on how our applications and networks are performing, right down to each end user.”
Both companies say that Riverbed SteelCentral Aternity is “the first step in achieving this ambition”.
Since implementing the technology, McCullough Robertson Lawyers says it has “seen the potential for significant performance increases, and it’s allowed the firm to standardise protocols”.
“Thanks to the Riverbed solution, McCullough Robertson now has the required visibility to know where we need to prioritise our efforts in improving our IT,” said Dutta.
Delivering greater value to the business
We’re told that SteelCentral Aternity has “also empowered the IT team at McCullough Robertson Lawyers to pro-actively contribute value to the business, rather than reactively dealing with issues”.
“The use of Riverbed SteelCentral Aternity represents a major culture shift at McCullough Robertson Lawyers. IT is now seen as a trusted partner in our business, capable of giving employees time back in their working day – which is invaluable in our profession,” Dutta said. He expects to see other firms follow McCullough Robertson Lawyers’ IT transformation.
“Legal firms across the world operate using the same applications, productivity tools and systems and the issues we face are often the same in other law firms. We are also a collaborative industry and I’m already seeing strong interest in what we are doing here across the Australian legal landscape.”
So, what is a bit more info on Riverbed delivering solutions for cloud and digital world?
As you’d expect, Riverbed tells us it is “delivering solutions to help companies transition from legacy hardware to a new software-defined and cloud-centric approach to networking, and improve end user experience, allowing enterprises’ digital transformation initiatives to reach their full potential.”
It further proudly boasts that its “integrated platform delivers the agility, visibility, and performance businesses need to be successful in a cloud and digital world”.
By leveraging Riverbed’s platform, the company says “organisations can deliver apps, data, and services from any public, private, or hybrid cloud across any network to any end-point”.
Claiming its Riverbed SteelHead solution is “the industry’s #1 optimisation solution for accelerated delivery and peak performance of applications across the software-defined WAN”, the company says its SteelCentral product family is “a performance management and control suite that combines user experience, application, and network performance management to provide the visibility needed to diagnose and cure issues before end users notice a problem, call the help desk, or jump to another web site out of frustration”.