Sitting on the fence…

In this uncertain environment, organizations seek better operational efficiencies while trying to maintain growth and customer commitments. As a result, there is an increasing dependency on business processes and key applications that support strategic objectives.

Therefore, the ability to guarantee the performance of these business-critical applications over the WAN is vital. At the same time, enterprises are looking to cut cost each time it is possible.

James Weller, Technical Services Manager, describes how The BSS Group plc avoids bandwidth upgrades and reduces its telecom costs by using the Ipanema solution.

Thierry Grenot, CTO at Ipanema, comments on the economic impact of Ipanema solutions and how integrated features relate to hard savings at the global network level.

Feel free to download our recorded webcast with Dr. Jim Metzler who explains how you can slash network costs while guaranteeing the performance of your applications. 

Guarantee, improve, maximize... Reduce, lower, simplify, minimize... An interesting challenge that we will successfully address together!

Have a nice reading

Béatrice
 

SUCCESS STORY

The BSS Group optimizes network pipeline with Ipanema

Béatrice Durand for Ipanews: James, please can you tell us more about The BSS Group?
James Weller: The BSS Group plc is a specialist distributor of industrial and mechanical supplies operating in both the retail and trade industries. With over 400 sites around the UK and Ireland, its network infrastructure is centralized and hosted from a data center in Leicester. The network serves approximately 5,000 employees.

BD: Why did you require an application traffic management solution?
JM: We made the decision to upgrade our main application from a legacy green-screen Telnet-based solution to the Kerridge K8 application, which has a graphical interface that requires more bandwidth. We have an MPLS network with most sites connected via standard ADSL and we were very aware that the new system required fast response time. This would not only be due to the upgraded application, but also from moving to a PC set up that would result in additional email and web usage.

This meant we would either need to upgrade our network or find a way of managing our existing one so that we could guarantee the performance of our critical applications. Obviously, upgrading the network is extremely expensive, so we were looking for a management solution that would optimize what we already had, giving us a stronger return on investment.

BD: And why Ipanema?
JW: We approached network consultants, The Logic Group, who recommended Ipanema’s solution as an alternative to a network upgrade. We already had a solution in place that gave us visibility of the network; however, it was not able to go beyond this to deliver real value from the information. In contrast, the Ipanema system monitors the activity on the network and profiles the way it is used, gathering information on the kind of traffic traveling over the WAN, where it comes from and at what times. The traffic is assigned criticality levels so the system can dynamically react to changes and demands in the environment, and it prioritizes traffic in real-time so we can guarantee our end-users the performance they need from their most important applications.

We identified Ipanema as the perfect fit: not only does the system react in real-time so we can sit back and watch it work, but we only need to put a device on each link in the MPLS WAN cloud at the data center, avoiding any changes at the 400 sites. We were aware that many of the solutions on the market required us to locate boxes at all sites and this would have cost more, not to mention the additional installation requirements.

BD: To sum-up, what benefits has The BSS Group seen from using the Ipanema system?
JW: The Ipanema system is managing both the primary ADSL network and The BSS Group’s secondary, back-up ISDN line. So if we lose an ADSL link and the branch dials in via ISDN, the Ipanema devices continue to prioritize the business-critical traffic, which is especially critical with the drop in bandwidth.

We now have the Ipanema system working across the entire network. At the end of the day, it just does exactly what we wanted it to – it manages our network traffic based on criticality and demand so we have the peace of mind of knowing that when we upgrade our most important applications will perform without incurring any extra cost.  

There are other major benefits we’ve found with the system as well; for example, in monitoring the network, you can set the system to produce really straightforward reports and graphs. This helps with our capacity planning and it also provides a tool that we can use if we need to demonstrate how the network is performing in line with SLAs.