Roseland, NJ. – November 24, 2008 – Expand Networks, www.expand.com, a leading provider of application acceleration solutions over the Wide Area Network (WAN), today announced that the company’s WAN accelerators have helped another non-profit company, Wingspan Care Group, to improve its overall communications through boosting application response times, which in turn have improved operational efficiencies and greatly improved user experiences with technology that provides the benefits of Virtual Proximity. Expand was chosen over both Riverbed and Packeteer (now Blue Coat) as it did substantially better in tests conducted by Wingspan’s IT department. Expand also has a strong track record assisting non-profit companies with improving their communications across the WAN.
Wingspan is a progressive organization that continues to expand its holdings by identifying other organizations that may benefit from its breadth and depth of services and experience. With its most recent acquisition of Applewood Centers, Wingspan needed to find a solution that would improve application performance at the branch locations and main campus site, enable scalability as the company grew and provide a return-on-investment (ROI) in less than a year.
“Given today’s economy, working for a not-for-profit organization has never been more challenging,” explained Mark Blados, Network Manager, Wingspan Care Group. “We epitomize doing more with less everyday, while still trying to assist our clients as quickly, efficiently, and thoroughly as possible. We needed a solution that could grow as we did, and one that could be easily deployed and managed remotely.”
Wingspan turned to a trusted IT solutions partner, DP Sciences Corporation, to get their input on various WAN Optimization providers. As a result, Packeteer, Riverbed and Expand Networks were evaluated.
The Expand WAN Accelerators were the clear winners, delivering a Virtual Proximity experience over the WAN to Wingspan’s users with a 430% improvement in network traffic performance. More importantly, as remote office bandwidth needs increased, Expand was able to provide remote support by supplying a software license key that would “turn on” support for higher bandwidth utilization and enable a hardware upgrade without a physical forklift. This was a clear differentiator over Riverbed, which would have required physically replacing existing equipment at each site.
“We run a very tight IT organization, both in terms of monetary and people resources. Expand’s solution is very scalable while being truly cost-effective. I only pay for the features I use. In addition, they saved us the cost of having to get another T1,” said Mr. Blados.
“The pain of WAN communications continues to increase as organizations become more dispersed globally, and remote workers increase in number,” said Efi Gatmor, Chief Technical Officer of Expand. “At Expand, our goal is to solve that pain wherever it may be, with technology that has the capacity to be virtually everywhere. This is true whether it’s a physical environment, such as a router or in a virtual setting. We are gratified in particular to help community-based organizations such as Wingspan focus more on the work at hand by improving their overall communications throughout various branch offices.”
Wingspan’s bandwidth utilization was greater than 66% before installing Expand Networks Accelerators. Now, utilization has been cut in half. The report that used to take remote offices 16 minutes to create is now created in 4 minutes. Network throughput increased by a factor of four. Also, with Wide Area File Services (WAFS) enabled, remote based employees and those in the field are able to open documents and files shared on the network much more quickly. In short, everyone – both office-based and network connected, to remote office workers, to those in the field – can be more productive, and have the tools they need to more effectively help others in the community.
“With the cost of a T1 being at least $800 month, and by improving our throughput by up to four times, we have achieved an ROI in under a year. Expand Networks not only met our critical short term needs with a cost effective solution, but also enables us to look to future growth. No other vendor we dealt with did a better job of improving our traffic, had better support, or was as scalable as Expand. Not Packeteer, not Riverbed,” concluded Mr. Blados.
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.