Slough, UK – 14th July 2009 – Expand Networks www.expand.com, the leader in optimizing WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualization, today announced that Drive Assist, the non fault accident specialists, has deployed Expand Networks’ WAN Optimization technology to accelerate the delivery of its business applications and bring its distributed workforce in virtual proximity of applications and datacentre services. Expand’s WAN Optimization technology has improved user productivity and business efficiency whilst delivering low TCO and contributing to significant reduction in ICT expenditure.
Drive Assist specialize in providing replacement vehicles for innocent parties following roadside accidents. The business has grown dramatically in recent years and now boasts national coverage via 19 regional offices. With no remote servers in place, users at Drive Assist’s remote offices were physically separated from the applications and services they required to do their jobs, relying on WAN links to access data from the head office site. With increasingly large amounts of data travelling over the WAN, latency and congestion challenges began to compromise business efficiency.
“Bandwidth capacity became an increasing concern,” explains Simon Wilson, network manager at Drive Assist. “As staff numbers increased so did the WAN traffic, resulting in poor network performance. Initially we undertook a company-wide bandwidth upgrade to overcome this. However, as the organization continued to grow, specifically from an administration standpoint, it became clear this was not sufficient. We generated more and more documents and with that came more printing, causing the WAN links to become saturated very quickly - even after the upgrade.”
Drive Assist evaluated WAN Optimisation technology from Expand Networks and Riverbed to address the problem and selected Expand Networks for its superior Wide Area File Services (WAFS) capability and favorable business case. “Proven business value is critical for any procurement we make and our financial director sought a guaranteed pay back from the technology within one year,” comments Wilson. “Whilst Riverbed’s solution offered us pay back for our investment over a four year period, Expand could deliver a full RoI within 11 months – the choice was simple.”
Expand Networks’ integrated WAN Optimization approach uses techniques such as byte-level caching and dynamic compression, delivering a superior end user experience for Drive Assist by ensuring fast and secure access to centrally located data across its increasingly distributed WAN. The compression capabilities of the platform quickly delivered the bandwidth increase required whilst the acceleration techniques overcame any latency. In addition, according to Wilson, Expand’s integrated WAFS functionality enabled employees at the branch offices to collaborate with shared data as though they were on the same LAN.
“Expand has given us a very stable network environment. The performance of our applications is significantly quicker, improving our remote users’ productivity. Monitoring tells us that usage is now so low we are set to trade the 2Mg links that we upgraded in 2008 back down to 1Mg, which translates into yet another significant cost saving. With Expand we are reaping the productivity benefits of WAN Optimization at the same time as reducing the TCO and increasing the RoI on our existing infrastructure.”
The WAN Optimization technology is also supporting all VoIP calls at Drive Assist. With all calls recorded for security reasons, VoIP traffic going back to the main site can suffer from packet loss causing a jitter effect. Expand’s layer 7 QoS (Quality of Service) ensures all VoIP traffic has the protected bandwidth it needs.
Adam Davison, VP Corporate Marketing and Sales, Expand Networks, comments; “As users and their applications move further apart, business performance suffers. Expand’s technology delivers a virtual proximity experience designed to close this gap through the delivery of virtual bandwidth. Drive Assist is a great example of how our next generation compression and caching techniques can take limited Wide Area Links and create 4 to 10 times the throughputs - on the exact same infrastructure. In today’s economic conditions, sweating your assets in this way is critical and as Drive Assist shows, our technology can increases business productivity whilst delivering extended returns on network investments by stretching limited resources further.”
About Drive Assist
Drive Assist’s mission is to be the leading supplier of short-term replacement vehicles, by providing an unrivalled quality in accident advice and support.
With over 1,400 employees, two call centres and 18 key operational sites the organisation assists thousands of motorists every month. Drive Assist has a diverse fleet of over 17,500 vehicles from basic courtesy cars right through to commercial and prestigious vehicles.
Unlike its competitors, approximately 90% of the fleet is owned, which enables Drive Assist to be extremely flexible when hiring out vehicles. Drive Assist’s nationwide delivery infrastructure ensures that all vehicles are delivered promptly and in line with the client’s needs.
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.