Expand Networks, www.expand.com, a leading provider of application acceleration solutions over the Wide Area Network (WAN), today announced Parmalat (PTY) Ltd producers and distributors of milk and dairy products, has implemented Expand´s WAN Optimisation technology, improving the performance of the organisation´s WAN and satellite links whilst removing the cost of constant bandwidth upgrades.
Operating in the competitive FMCG industry, Parmalat requires fast and secure communication channels across its supply chain. To guarantee that network throughput achieved its maximum potential, Parmalat´s latency and congestion issues experienced over the WAN needed to be addressed. The cost of consistent bandwidth upgrades was too prohibitive in South Africa to be a real consideration and an alternative was needed, as Igshaan Jackson, IT Infrastructure Manager at Parmalat SA explains:
"In our business, we run a centralized ERP system, centralized reporting, and do Oracle replication over the WAN and therefore rely heavily on bandwidth for all our day–to–day operations. We quickly realised that we needed an alternative solution that could provide the capacity we needed to ensure our business operations could run as smoothly as possible."
After extensive live tests, Jackson and his team chose Expand´s Accelerator platform for its superior acceleration and QoS capabilities.
The integrated WAN optimisation technology within Expand´s Platform enabled Parmalat to immediately compress and accelerate traffic across the WAN. Following on from this overwhelming success of Expand´s technology across the organization in South Africa, Jackson further identified some problematic network areas in neighbouring countries, Zambia and Botswana.
Employees´ limited access to applications due to high latency and packet loss over satellite networks meant that bandwidth capacity was becoming an increasing concern for some of Parmalat´s additional sites located across Africa. Looking to replicate the success of the Expand solution, Jackson looked at how it could be applied to the specific satellite problems being encountered at the additional sites across the continent.
He continues, "It was when faced with the network performance problems in Africa that I discovered Expand´s advanced capabilities in the satellite arena. I found we could apply the same proven technology to the satellite environment and achieve the same results. With this, the delays in file transfers and response times would no longer be an issue - making a perfect addendum to the network optimisation solution."
After fully utilising all Expand´s WAN Optimisation capabilities and after the successful completion of a prototype in one of the most challenging sites in southern Africa; Parmalat´s workforce are already benefitting from an improved network performance of up to 300%.
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