Expand Networks http://www.expand.com, the leader in optimising WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualisation, today announced that Wiss and Company, the global accountancy firm, has deployed Expand Networks' WAN optimisation technology to accelerate the delivery of its business applications and improve network performance.
Expand Networks' ability to accelerate all IP traffic has successfully brought its remote users into virtual proximity of their applications and data centre services, significantly increasing the organisation's productivity and supporting business growth.
With two hundred users working across its New York-based headquarters and remote offices, a high-performing network is critical for the accountancy firm's business efficiency as it looks to further grow its global customer base and continue upon an aggressive growth strategy.
Don Logan, IT Executive at Wiss, comments: “We were experiencing very poor interconnectivity between our offices, and the performance of our business critical applications simply wasn't cutting it. Despite running a 3MG MPLS circuit, we were still facing a serious performance handicap when it came to network throughput.
“In particular, sensitive Citrix applications became dominated by more aggressive applications. This caused congestion, which meant data transfer between our remote offices and headquarters was very slow. Other applications that we rely on, such as document management, e-mail and VOIP were also starved of the bandwidth they needed, and we faced an unacceptable situation as our network continued to burst at peak times. With our network causing sever user frustration, it was clear we had to re-asses our communications infrastructure.”
Exorbitant local telecoms costs meant Wiss chose to apply optimisation techniques to its current infrastructure rather than upgrade its lines. Testing solutions from other companies, according to Logan, Expand clearly demonstrated superior acceleration against the other solutions. He comments: “Expand's was the only solution that had the capability to accelerate all our traffic, looking across the whole spectrum of protocols and applications and accelerating everything to optimise our performance levels. Expand's superior ability to optimise Citrix, SQL and apply QOS to VOIP traffic, made the decision easy.”
Expand Networks' integrated WAN optimisation uses techniques such as byte-level caching and dynamic compression to accelerate the delivery of business services. Once in place, the Expand Networks' Accelerators quickly delivered the bandwidth increase Wiss required, successfully doubling the throughput over the WAN. In parallel, its QOS technology prioritised and protected the company's business-critical Citrix applications from congestion and provided a consistent VOIP service, while the acceleration techniques overcame any latency.
“Put simply, since the Expand deployment we have gone from very poor performance to very efficient performance, with positive user feedback all round. Our remote users immediately noticed when we took out the Expand solution; after the initial trial, its impact was clear to see. Our tests show that we have doubled our network throughput, which is particularly pleasing from an ROI perspective, given we were initially faced with an expensive line upgrade as an alternative,” Logan added.
The great success of the technology in addressing application performance issues has heightened Wiss' interest in exploring the Wide Area File Services (WAFS) capability of the platform. Wiss is set to deploy the additional the Wide Area File Services (WAFS) functionality integrated in the Expand solution later this year, to enable branch offices to access and work on centrally held files as if on the local server. As a growing business with a highly mobile workforce, Wiss is also exploring the possibility of Expand Networks' recently launched, Mobile Accelerator Client to extend the benefits of optimisation for any user, at any location.
Adam Davison, Corporate VP Sales & Marketing, comments: “A growing organisation like Wiss and Company needs optimum performance from its network infrastructure, to maximise business productivity and increase market competitiveness. Only a holistic approach to optimisation can achieve these goals, and it goes to show that in those competitive product situations, Expand's superior acceleration performance, coupled with its economically sound ROI, will win out.”
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