September 17th 2007 – Expand Networks (www.expand.com), a leading provider of application acceleration solutions over the WAN and recently positioned in Gartner’s Leaders Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers 2006, has announced it has enabled the smooth migration to web-based applications at leading technology recruitment company, Spring Group PLC, by enhancing the speed of network performance across its increasingly distributed environment.
Specialising in IT and technology recruitment, Spring Group recognises the need to align IT with business strategy. A move to web-based applications served to improve productivity and support the future growth of the company, but it also introduced a new set of challenges. As its business critical applications moved further away from its users, WAN connectivity to remote office sites struggled to cope with the increased demand that its bandwidth hungry applications placed on the network causing increased congestion across the WAN.
Following extensive testing alongside its competitor Riverbed Technology, Expand Networks’ Compass was chosen for its superior acceleration and QoS capabilities to improve the performance of the Spring Group’s critical applications and optimise the WAN. Rob Anderson, Group Communications Manager at Spring Group explains:
“Running a number of business critical applications from MS Exchange to the more specific recruitment application Bond Adapt, we rely on the absolute performance of our WAN to deliver applications and business data to our users’ desks quickly and securely.
“In particular, Bond Adapt is very bandwidth hungry and became very susceptible to latency and congestion. We chose Expand’s Compass to prioritise traffic in order to maintain business productivity in light of this.”
The integrated WAN optimisation technology within the Compass platform enabled Spring Group to immediately compress traffic flows across the WAN, whilst QoS techniques prioritised the mission critical applications, ensuring they were supported by the requisite bandwidth and protected from congestion, with acceleration techniques used to overcome latency.
Anderson comments, “The results after implementing the Compass platform were clear, the applications that were prone to latency on the network had improved performance immediately. The overall increase in the speed of network operations is as high as 600%, enabling our distributed offices to work as productively and efficiently as possible.”
Competition is high in the recruitment sector and the dynamics of the industry requires Spring Group to adopt an agile stance, enabling it to implement change quickly. The visibility element of the Compass Platform enabled Spring Group to be better informed about the performance of all the applications on the network, supporting the IT department’s need to react to the quickly changing needs of the business.
“Critically, Expand provided us with a cost effective solution that is scalable according to business needs as we can easily reallocate the hardware in accordance to wherever the requirement may be,” continued Anderson. “We are now able to deliver fast and reliable remote access to our business critical applications and can improve the performance at any site in just a few days notice rather than weeks.”
The company has an aggressive growth target over the next 12 months and into the future. As such, Spring group is looking to extend the web-based migration project, and is set to deploy further Compass platforms at more of its 35 offices throughout the UK and Europe, to enable the business to cope with the growing number of users and remote offices reliant on the WAN.
“Web and sever based computing projects are becoming an ever more popular means to simplify networks at the same time as reducing business expenditure, but can be doomed to fail without assessing the affects on the network and in turn its users,” comments Rob Drew, , Sales Director, UK and Ireland, Expand Networks. “The Compass platform enables these projects to succeed by aligning IT to critical business drivers and delivering the network performance needed to maintain productivity and increase efficiency that can otherwise be badly impacted following such a project.”
About Gartner’s Magic Quadrant
The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted October 2006 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
About Spring Group
The Group's principal activities are providing recruitment, staffing and related services. The Group comprises several businesses specialising in permanent and contract IT and technology recruitment, the provision of executive, managerial, financial, clerical, engineering and industrial staff across all sectors, workforce management services and Recruitment Process Outsourcing. The Group's clients include HBOS PLC, Barclays, Jaguar, Land-Rover, accenture, NHS, EDS, orange, steria, Prudential, The Royal Bank of Scotland, EADS, BlackpoolCouncil, Sanctuary Housing, RM, Capita Resourcing, Elan, Hammersmith & Fulham, lorien, E-Trade Financial, radius and Fujitsu. The Group operates in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
About Expand Networks
Expand Networks is the pioneer and leader in helping 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 COMPASS, 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 1,450 enterprise and government customers including: American Express, Bacardi USA, BMW, Continental Airlines, Carr America, Colgate, Elizabeth Arden, Reed Exhibitions, Target and United States Department of Defense.
Expand Networks, Accelerator, Expand Compass, ExpandView are trademarks of Expand Networks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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Press Contact:
David Rowlands/Jennifer Manning
Cohesive Communications
Tel: +44 (0) 1291 626200
Email: expand@cohesive.uk.com
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, 2009[i]. 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 serves more than 3,500 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 40,000 units deployed and over 2,000 MS Terminal Services and Citrix customers. Expand is the largest supplier of WAN Optimization products to US Government and Military agencies (greater than 10,000 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.