F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced that Sinclair Knight Merz (SKM)  has optimised the performance of its recent Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployment by implementing F5® BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM™) with WebAccelerator™  to ensure a superior user experience.

“Our initial testing showed a four times performance improvement through the use of F5’s solutions with SharePoint” said Richard Percy, Telecommunications and Security Manager, Sinclair Knight Merz.

SKM is a leading engineering, sciences, and project delivery firm. With 48 offices and 6,500 employees around the world, it provides independent technical, strategic, and commercial advice for a wide range of projects. Recently, the company embarked on a global rollout of Microsoft SharePoint to host its corporate intranet, performance dialogue system, and other key business applications.

“We needed SharePoint to work—and work well—from day one. If employees experience excessive latency with an enterprise application like SharePoint, they won’t use it. F5’s solutions ensure that we get top performance from SharePoint so that our employees can leverage this new collaborative environment to better serve our clients. This translates directly into a positive return on our SharePoint investment.”

With BIG-IP LTM and WebAccelerator, F5’s Application Ready Solution for Microsoft SharePoint provides SKM with a complete set of resources—including step-by-step deployment guidance and pre-configured, validated acceleration policies—that simplify the design, deployment, and management of SharePoint across the network. With F5 and Microsoft solutions working in concert, SKM was able to improve user experience, strengthen security, unify access control and enforcement, and ensure superior scalability for SharePoint.

“Our implementation partner, Dimension Data, initially recommended that we investigate F5’s BIG-IP solutions as a part of its solution architecture,” added Percy. “And other members of the team and I also had experience with the BIG-IP platform from previous organisations. It had all the features we required, including an intuitive interface, and was simple to configure.”

BIG-IP LTM with WebAccelerator adds intelligence to standard browser capabilities to continually optimise and accelerate application data. The BIG-IP solution also caches information for SKM, meaning that, once data has been downloaded overseas, it is permanently available at that destination. As a result, application requests back to the primary data center in Sydney are significantly decreased.

With BIG-IP’s failover capabilities, SKM can also meet their global availability needs with only one BIG-IP device, instead of requiring a separate device for each office. “Availability is crucial,” added Percy, “which is one of the reasons we looked at the failover option. But having the support and resources from F5 to help us address the evolving needs of our business is also critical.”

To learn more about F5’s Application Ready Solution for Microsoft SharePoint, please visit www.f5.com/solutions/applications/microsoft/office-sharepoint-server.

About F5 Networks

F5 Networks is the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), focused on secure, reliable and fast delivery of applications. F5’s flexible architectural framework enables community-driven innovation that helps organisations to enhance IT agility and dynamically deliver services that generate true business value. F5's vision of unified application and data delivery offers customers an unprecedented level of choice in how they deploy ADN solutions. It redefines the management of application, server, storage, and network resources, streamlining application delivery and reducing costs. Global enterprise organisations, service and cloud providers, and Web 2.0 content providers trust F5 to keep their business moving forward. For more information, go to www.f5.com.