Grocon claims $150k savings with Expand Networks deployment

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 14 May 2009 10:36

IT Industry - Strategy

Construction and development group, Grocon, claims annual savings of $150,000 in service provider costs from its deployment of Expand Networks’ WAN optimisation technology in its Australian operations.

Grocon says implementation of  Expand Accelerators has optimised the traffic flow between building project sites and its head office, and by improving data speeds over the WAN, it has been able to renegotiate its private MPLS IP WAN bandwidth allocation to reduce service provider costs from $24,000 to $11,000 per month. 

Philip Pearson, ICT manager for Grocon, says the technology has made collaboration between sites a reality, improving  productivity and securing Grocon's knowledge management processes.

"Consistently slow application response times - up to 15 minutes in some instances - meant many employees were saving files locally to avoid transferring them across the network.
 
“Multiple file versions stored locally meant our back-up procedures were not being properly followed.  Now, with the Expand Accelerators in place, we are able to pre-cache relevant shared documents so that the files are quick to download and employees are not tempted to save files locally on their desktop."

Expand’s VP Asia Pacific, Steve O'Brien, says Grocon's workforce is scattered around project sites and therefore “relies on effective collaboration technologies to link the teams together.”

O’Brien maintains that it was no surprise to learn that Grocon were “struggling to cope with their 2Mb links back to headquarters when they were trying to transfer large CAD files with absolutely no prioritisation measures in place.”

“Unlike other WAN optimisation solutions which offer network based QoS, Expand has superior application level QoS to ensure applications run unimpeded on the WAN.  Not only has Grocon improved operations, but it has reduced its network capacity requirements to see a return on investment in just 14 months on service provider costs alone."

According to O’Brien, Expand’s accelerators use low latency, lossless techniques that work on all applications to “consistently deliver average bandwidth increases between 100 per cent and 400 percent.“