South Africa's Parmalat is a producer and distributor of milk and mainstream dairy products with annual revenues of over $4 billion. It operates in over twelve countries across the world and employs over 14,000 staff.

Operating in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods industry, defined as "the things you buy on a regular basis at places like your local supermarket," Parmalat’s latency and congestion issues experienced over the WAN needed to be addressed.

Parmalat SA deployed Expand’s Accelerator platform across all its remote sites, reaching over 1,000 employees: "The integrated WAN optimization technology within Expand’s platform enabled Parmalat to compress and accelerate traffic across the WAN," company officials said.

By implementing Expand’s platform, Jackson said, congestion and latency issues were immediately addressed and Parmalat’s employees have grown accustomed to the new levels of speed and access that the technology has introduced to the company.

Jackson further identified some problematic network areas in the neighboring countries of Mozambique, Namibia and Botswana.

"Employees’ limited access to applications due to high latency and packet loss over satellite networks meant that bandwidth capacity was becoming an increasing concern for some of Parmalat’s additional sites located across Africa," Expand officials said, adding that Jackson looked at how it could be applied to the specific satellite problems being encountered at the additional sites across the continent.

"I found we could apply the same proven technology to the satellite environment and achieve the same results. With this, the delays in file transfers and response times would no longer be an issue," Jackson said.