Expand Networks' Technology Improves Efficiency through Consolidated IT Initiatives
Roseland, NJ – July 19th 2010 – Expand Networks (www.expand.com) the leader in WAN optimization for branch office consolidation and virtualization, has been chosen by leading animal nutrition company, Ridley Inc., to assure the success of major IT initiatives, including server consolidation, thin-client computing and bandwidth optimization. Having initially deployed Expand as part of a bandwidth consolidation project, the $200,000 investment paid for itself in just over 6 months. Ridley is now investing a further $180,000 in new Expand technology in order to meet renewed bandwidth requirements needed to support ongoing business growth and strategic IT initiatives, and is set to recoupyear on year savings of $250,000 from the deployment.
Ridley Inc. manufactures and markets animal nutrition and health products and is a publicly traded company on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Based on a business ethos of 'continuous improvement', it operates from 42 locations across North America employing over 1200 staff. With most locations being extremely harsh and dusty environments, such as feed mills, Ridley embarked on a thin-computing strategy, removing servers and computers from remote locations and delivering server based computing from its central location in Mankato, Minnesota.
Chad Gillick, IT Manager, Ridley Inc. explains, "We recognize the importance of IT in enabling the business to streamline its processes, gain greater efficiencies, increase productivity and reduce costs. Expand's WAN optimization technology has been a critical enabler in helping us deploy strategic IT initiatives such as server based computing and virtual desktop infrastructure."
By deploying the Expand solution Gillick has been able to remove expensive desktop and laptop computers at the remote sites and replace with thin client terminals, without the need for costly bandwidth upgrades.
Having looked at competitive offerings from Riverbed and Cisco, Gillick chose Expand because of its superior capabilities in accelerating Citrix and web based traffic. Furthermore, due to the fact that Ridley utilizes a managed WAN service from AT&T, Expand's WAFS capabilities with QoS, enabled Gillick to tailor traffic flows and dynamically manage bandwidth requirements 'on the fly'.
Gillick continues, "Not only did we recoup our initial $200,000 investment in just over 6 months based purely on efficiency and productivity savings, we're also gaining significant financial and operational benefits in other areas. For instance, without the Expand solution we would have needed a 45mbps connection at the central site that would have cost in the region of $26,000 per month. With Expand we were able to reduce this to a 9mbps link costing $4,500, an annual saving of over $250,000. On top of this, it's enabling of server consolidation and thin client computing, we have managed to reduce our technical refresh costs which were running at $400,000 annually down to $220,000. We believe we will be reaping the benefits of the Expand solution for many years to come."
Adam Davison, corporate VP sales and marketing, Expand Networks, comments, "We continue to see tremendous traction in the market place for our technology. It's especially rewarding when an organization such as Ridley Inc., that clearly places a huge emphasis on its IT infrastructure to deliver business agility and competitive advantage, chooses Expand's solution over competitive offerings. This is further validation of Expand's technology and demonstrated why WAN optimization is becoming a catalyst and enabler for many of today's strategic IT initiatives."
More information on Ridley's WAN optimization project can be found at: http://www.expand.com/ridleyinc
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Like peanut-butter and jelly, cloud computing and application acceleration are just better together.
Ann Bednarz of Network World waxes predictive regarding 2010 trends in application delivery and WAN optimization in WAN optimization in 2010. One of the interesting tidbits she offers from research firm Gartner is growth in the application acceleration market:
Consider, if you will, that an organization chooses to deploy an application which will be used on a daily basis by employees in "the cloud." In previous incarnations that application would have likely been deployed in the local data center, accessible to employees over the local LAN. High speed. Low latency. The only real obstacle to astounding application performance would have been hardware and software limitations imposed by the choice of server hardware, web/application server software, and the database. Now move that application to "the cloud" and consider the potential obstacles to application performance that are introduced: higher latency, lower speed, less control. What's potentially true is that moving to "the cloud" mitigates the expense associated with higher performing servers so bottlenecks that may have occurred due to limitations imposed by the server hardware are gone, but they are replaced by the inevitable degradation of performance that comes with delivery over the Internet – higher latency, because it's farther away and there are more users out there than "in here" and lower speed because it's rare that an organization has LAN-like speeds even to the Internet.
So what we have is a most cost-effective method of deploying applications that's farther away from its users. The potential – and I'd say inevitability – is there that performance will be impacted and not in a good way. The solution is to (1) keep the application deployed locally, (2) tell the users to deal with it, or (3) employ the use of application acceleration/optimization solutions to provide consistent performance of an acceptable level to users no matter where they might end up.
There are well-known, proven solutions to addressing the core problem of distance on application performance: caching, compression, more efficient connection management, etc… All of which fall under the "application acceleration" umbrella. As cloud computing experiences higher adoption rates it is inevitable that performance will be raised as an issue and will need to be addressed. Hence it makes perfect sense that growing cloud computing adoption will provide growth opportunities for application acceleration solution vendors' as well, which will positively impact that market.
That's good news for customers and end-users, as they are typically the folks who are impacted the most by architectural and deployment changes to applications. Usability is impacted by performance and responsiveness, which directly impacts productivity – one of the key metrics upon which many end-user employees are evaluated. A rise in offerings related to application acceleration for cloud computing deployed applications will be beneficial to both providers (differentiation and up-selling of services) and customers (remediating potential impact of moving applications further from users) alike.
As the cloud matures we are likely to see, in general, a positive impact on many application delivery related markets – WAN acceleration, application acceleration, and application security – as providers begin to offer a wider variety of services in order to differentiate from the competition and make their offerings more attractive to enterprise-class customers used to having many more technological options for dealing with application delivery challenges than are currently available from most cloud computing providers.
http://bit.ly/5NMFEA
Ann Bednarz of Network World waxes predictive regarding 2010 trends in application delivery and WAN optimization in WAN optimization in 2010. One of the interesting tidbits she offers from research firm Gartner is growth in the application acceleration market:
This, when viewed alongside the predictions that cloud computing – both public and private –will see significant growth in 2010, should be no surprise.Second, the research firm is predicting a return to modest growth for the application acceleration market in 2010. Gartner is forecasting a compound annual growth rate of 12.22%, with 2014 revenue of $4.27 billion.
It shouldn't be a surprise, but perhaps the connection isn't as obvious as it first appears. Organizations are global, yes, but for many businesses – especially those that are most likely to take advantage of cloud computing and its cost reducing benefits, i.e. mid-sized and smaller organizations – they often focus on a fairly localized market. Larger organizations have no doubt undergone the exercise in the past of determining where, from a performance standpoint, it is best to deploy second and even tertiary data centers. Public cloud computing, however, changes the impact of location on performance and opens up a potentially increasing need for application acceleration solutions to combat longer distances and the impact of changing the delivery epicenter of their most critical, customer and end-user facing applications.The build out of "enterprise class" cloud computing service will continue to major growth area. IDC stated "The emergence of enterprise-grade cloud services will be a unifying theme in this area, with a battle unfolding in cloud application platforms -- the most strategic real estate in the cloud for the next 20 years." The overall growth in the IT industry for major categories of hardware, software and services are expected to have a 2 to 4% growth rate.
CLOUD COMPUTING and the IMPACT on the APPLICATION ACCELERATION MARKET
Consider, if you will, that an organization chooses to deploy an application which will be used on a daily basis by employees in "the cloud." In previous incarnations that application would have likely been deployed in the local data center, accessible to employees over the local LAN. High speed. Low latency. The only real obstacle to astounding application performance would have been hardware and software limitations imposed by the choice of server hardware, web/application server software, and the database. Now move that application to "the cloud" and consider the potential obstacles to application performance that are introduced: higher latency, lower speed, less control. What's potentially true is that moving to "the cloud" mitigates the expense associated with higher performing servers so bottlenecks that may have occurred due to limitations imposed by the server hardware are gone, but they are replaced by the inevitable degradation of performance that comes with delivery over the Internet – higher latency, because it's farther away and there are more users out there than "in here" and lower speed because it's rare that an organization has LAN-like speeds even to the Internet. So what we have is a most cost-effective method of deploying applications that's farther away from its users. The potential – and I'd say inevitability – is there that performance will be impacted and not in a good way. The solution is to (1) keep the application deployed locally, (2) tell the users to deal with it, or (3) employ the use of application acceleration/optimization solutions to provide consistent performance of an acceptable level to users no matter where they might end up.
There are well-known, proven solutions to addressing the core problem of distance on application performance: caching, compression, more efficient connection management, etc… All of which fall under the "application acceleration" umbrella. As cloud computing experiences higher adoption rates it is inevitable that performance will be raised as an issue and will need to be addressed. Hence it makes perfect sense that growing cloud computing adoption will provide growth opportunities for application acceleration solution vendors' as well, which will positively impact that market.
That's good news for customers and end-users, as they are typically the folks who are impacted the most by architectural and deployment changes to applications. Usability is impacted by performance and responsiveness, which directly impacts productivity – one of the key metrics upon which many end-user employees are evaluated. A rise in offerings related to application acceleration for cloud computing deployed applications will be beneficial to both providers (differentiation and up-selling of services) and customers (remediating potential impact of moving applications further from users) alike.
As the cloud matures we are likely to see, in general, a positive impact on many application delivery related markets – WAN acceleration, application acceleration, and application security – as providers begin to offer a wider variety of services in order to differentiate from the competition and make their offerings more attractive to enterprise-class customers used to having many more technological options for dealing with application delivery challenges than are currently available from most cloud computing providers.
http://bit.ly/5NMFEA
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