[August 04, 2008]

Expand Networks Wins Schneider Electric & Lights Up Productivity

ROSELAND, N.J. --(Business Wire)-- Expand Networks, www.expand.com, a leading provider of application acceleration solutions over the Wide Area Network (WAN), today announced that Schneider Electric South Africa has implemented Expand's Compass technology to improve network performance for its vast estate of branch offices. The WAN optimization technology is boosting remote office productivity at the energy giant while removing the cost of consistently upgrading WAN links.

Growing organically and through an aggressive acquisition strategy, Schneider Electric has a large and expanding workforce. Having previously consolidated all its servers at its headquarters, Schneider quickly found its business applications contending with high levels of latency and congestion when traversing the WAN. With branch office employees consistently facing delays on the network, poor application performance was seriously impacting productivity and efficiency.

Willem Kuypers, Network Manager, Schneider Electrics SA, explains, "It was clear the latency and congestion issues experienced over the WAN needed to be addressed. In particular, Lotus Notes was very bandwidth intensive and was causing communications to be slow and cumbersome. With the cost of bandwidth upgrades so prohibitive, we looked for a far more cost-effective solution and new acceleration and optimization technology would enable us to maximize our existing assets to improve our network performance."

After a competitive tender, Schneider initially evaluated WAN optimization vendor Packeteer, however the IT team quickly turned to Expand Networks for its superior integrated QoS and compression techniques. Recommended by its recently acquired company Conlog, that had already successfully deployed Expand's technology, Kuypers was confident Expand's integrated technology platform could do the job:

"There are a number of vendor solutions in the market but during testing it was only the integrated technologies of Expand that could address our particular bandwidth and application requirements."

With the help of technology partner, Dimension Data, Schneider deployed Expand's Compass technology across its vast branch office environment, which had an immediate impact on application performance.

By implementing Expand's Compass technology, congestion and latency issues over the WAN have been significantly reduced with the problematic Lotus Notes performance accelerated by 300% and overall network throughput significantly increased.

With Expand in place, QoS techniques immediately prioritized the server-based applications, ensuring they were supported by the requisite bandwidth and protected from congestion with acceleration techniques used to overcome latency.

"Using the Compass platform has eradicated the strain on the network and the previous application delays," says Kuypers. "Business productivity can be directly linked to application performance, and with Expand we have a business solution that is enabling the workforce to remain efficient and help us remain competitive in the marketplace."

About Expand Networks

Expand Networks is the pioneer and leader in the WAN Optimization market and is positioned by Gartner Inc. in the 'Leaders' quadrant in its Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers, 2007(1). Expand helps organizations simplify their IT infrastructure while delivering remote offices fast, reliable and secure access to networked applications. This results in improved user productivity and cost-effective IT management. Expand offers a multi-service integrated platform that ensures superior performance for any application over any network. From its headquarters in Roseland, NJ and its global locations, Expand Networks (www.expand.com) serves more than 3,000 enterprise and public sector customers in over 100 countries including: American Express, Bacardi USA, BMW, Continental Airlines, Carr America, Colgate, Elizabeth Arden, Reed Exhibitions, Target and United States Department of Defense with over 36,000 units deployed. Expand is the largest supplier of WAN Optimization products to US Government and Military agencies (greater than 6,000 units) and also has the most units deployed at a single corporate location, (4,500).

Expand Networks, Accelerator, Expand Compass, ExpandView are trademarks of Expand Networks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

(1) Gartner Research "Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers 2007" by Andy Rolfe and Joe Skorupa. Published December 14, 2007. Report ID Number G00153256

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