Expand Networks, the leader in optimising WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualisation, today announced that Safcor Panalpina, the global provider of innovative supply chain management solutions, has implemented Expand's WAN optimisation technology to significantly improve the performance of the WAN to accelerate business critical applications and enable the successful rollout of Microsoft Terminal Services Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) across the company.
Safcor Panalpina operates a MPLS environment and as a result of outsourcing its network, conducted a full network audit that identified serious issues on the WAN of poor network performance, slow application response times leading to a frustrating end user experience. With immediate plans to rollout Microsoft Terminal Services across the organisation's distributed branch offices further exacerbating application performance issues, Safcor Panalpina looked to deploy WAN optimisation technology.
Following recommendations from its ICT partner, Thembanet, Safcor Panalpina evaluated WAN optimisation technology from Expand and BlueCoat's Packetshaper offering, selecting Expand Networks for its ability to seamlessly interoperate with MPLS networks, Monitor, Control, optimise the WAN and accelerate all business critical applications.
“We are a supply chain management organisation that depends on bandwidth hungry financial and logistical applications carrying business critical data, with files of anything up to 120MB in size. But due to WAN performance, the response times for remote users was dreadful and as we moved to a Terminal Services structure, the performance of our applications was only going to worsen,” said a spokesperson for Safcor Panalpina. “We chose Expand because it worked seamlessly in our complex MPLS environment and would also provide the same functionality on a Private Wide Area network utilising Telkom's leased lines, which we have moved to in the interim since the initial decision, offering an attractive scalable pricing model to grow with us and a guarantee from our partner that our network capacity would double.”
As Safcor Panalpina has moved to a Microsoft Terminal Services RDP environment, Expand Networks' integrated optimisation technology has bridged the gap between applications and users to bring them into virtual proximity and provide a superior end user experience.
By deploying the integrated optimisation capabilities of Expand Network's technology, Safcor Panalpina's WAN capacity has increased by 250% and throughput on some of the interactive applications by 75%, enabling the response times of Terminal Services and other business critical applications such as Core Freight and Accpac Financials to significantly improve. Layer 7 QOS technology provides visibility into the interactive RDP protocol to prioritise the Terminal Services removing them from congestion and in addition, Expand has also accelerated remote printing capabilities.
“As Safcor Panalpina diversifies from clearing and forwarding into supply chain logistics, where accurate and fast communication is essential, Expand has improved the performance of all applications over the WAN ensuring our end users have fast and reliable access,” commented the company's spokesperson. “The investment in our Terminal Services project has been protected and we're now working with Expand on supporting our WAFS project.”
“At a time when few investments can be guaranteed, global organisations can be confident that WAN optimisation technology is,” commented Adam Davison, VP of corporate sales and marketing at Expand. “Expand Networks has enabled Safcor Panalpina to optimise its WAN and accelerate all its business critical applications in a complex MPLS environment to improve the end user experience, and safeguard its Terminal Services initiative.”
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