The international chemical group Solvay says it has reduced its telecom costs by 30 percent by controlling application performance management (APM (News - Alert)) over a hybrid network. The company credits BT Connect Optimization, a BT managed service based on Ipanema Technologies’ solutions.
The service offers the next generation of network management to ensure important applications perform at their best and get the right bandwidth they need across the WAN, any time. The result is that applications respond faster and response times of services to customers are shorter. Solvay’s change happened after a Request for Proposal (RFP) for the creation of a Global Wide Area Network (WAN) in 2011. Because of the RFP process, the new WAN contract was signed with BT (News - Alert).
Following the successful acquisition of Rhodia, also in 2011, Solvay has been able to combine networks to support more sites, applications and users with the same network resource. The company was able to use both its MPLS network and Internet resources as a "single unified network." Now with BT’s help to bring the network and applications under control, Solvay has full control of its application performance over the global network and can protect applications, while ensuring business continuity by using all the available network resources, said Vincent Best, Solvay global WAN manager.
He also mentioned that, thanks to BT Connect Optimization, Solvay can now easily adapt to different traffic levels and changes in network traffic that might occur due to their IT transformations.
Using the visibility aspect of Ipanema’s (News - Alert) technology, Vincent and his team in the IT department “identified that only 30 percent of Solvay's bandwidth was utilized by critical business applications running over the private network. The remaining business and non-critical applications were running over the Internet,” as explained a recent post on the Computerworld UK website. With the Internet, Solvay can quickly increase bandwidth capacity according to its needs.
As per the post, this increasing use of bandwidth to guarantee the performance of the business’ critical applications over the network (the Internet) offers Solvay the opportunity to maximize its IT flexibility and avoid expensive MPLS capacity increases, by moving applications such as Gmail, Google (News - Alert) apps and SalesForce.com into the cloud. This meant they could reserve the MPLS network resources for critical business applications such as SAP (News - Alert), VoIP and video. In addition, Solvay moved its telepresence-dedicated network into a new multimedia network.
In sum, from 2011 to 2013, Solvay’s comparable telecom costs reduced by 30 percent because it was able to implement an approach that involves WAN Optimization with Application Performance Management (APM) to make better use of the network resources. This proved to be a solution that accelerates traffic while guaranteeing critical application performance. Using APM tools and metrics Solvay was able to determine the usage status of networks and applications; the company now gives precedence to their business critical applications and manages non-business critical traffic over both private Wide Area Networks (WANs) and the Internet for performance (data movement, response time, bandwidth and activity); thus, streamlining applications operations.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson