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Cisco WAN Optimization Solutions Help Hundreds of Customers Accelerate Business-Critical Applications Across the WAN
Spotlight on Three Customers' Experiences With Ease of Branch Office Management Benefits of Cisco WAAS
| Source: Cisco Systems, Inc.
SAN JOSE, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- March 6, 2007 -- Cisco® (NASDAQ : CSCO ) today announced that
Cisco Wide Area Network (WAN) Optimization solutions that ease management
of branch offices are achieving rapid adoption from hundreds of customers.
Customers including freight forwarding company Panalpina Group of North
America, architecture firm Reynolds, Smith and Hills, Inc., and travel
leader Sabre Holdings Corporation, are using the award-winning Cisco Wide
Area Application Services (WAAS) to share centralized files and increase
remote users' productivity and collaboration across the organization. As
part of Cisco's Application Networking Services Advanced Technology
segment, these Cisco WAAS customers help demonstrate Cisco's success in
improving the availability, performance, and security of applications
delivered across the network platform.
"Customers are rapidly deploying Cisco WAN Optimization solutions to
simplify branch data management, enable collaboration and accelerate access
to consolidated application infrastructures," said George Kurian, vice
president of the Application Delivery business unit of Cisco Systems. "We
are pleased that customers are endorsing our core design approach to enable
Cisco WAAS to be deployed and implemented seamlessly within our customers'
existing network services, provisioning and operational frameworks."
Freight Forwarder Used Cisco WAAS to Enable Data Center Consolidation
which Helped Save the Company One Million Dollars
An industry leading freight forwarding and logistics company, the Panalpina
Group of North America, deployed Cisco's WAN optimization solution as part
of their data center centralization project resulting in a one million
dollar savings in capital expenses. To maintain end-users productivity,
the company's IT organization needed a WAN optimization solution to ensure
that the 200 employees working out of their Toronto office would have the
same performance for email, file access, and print services as when the
applications were delivered by local servers.
"Cisco WAAS offered us a complete solution, accelerating all the
applications we were looking to optimize, including Exchange, SAP, file
services and print services," says Armin Heinlein, corporate vice
president, North American IT Competence Center for Panalpina. "Also with
Cisco, we are confident that they deliver a global solution that can be
deployed and maintained at all our locations world wide."
After testing, the company realized that Cisco WAAS delivered applications
centralized in their data centers to remote end-users at the same level of
performance as when the servers were stored locally without interfering
with their networking services. Since Cisco WAAS is transparent to existing
network services, Panalpina was able to easily install and integrate the
WAN optimization solution into their existing Cisco network of routers,
switches and IP communications services.
Architecture Firm Achieves LAN-like Performance Over the WAN
With numerous sites spread across the U.S., the architectural and
engineering firm Reynolds, Smith and Hills, Inc. (RS&H) faced the challenge
of helping collaborative teams of consultants and clients access and share
information. RS&H distributed data and business critical applications in
local offices connected throughout their WAN. The company's engineers and
consultants struggled with the WAN latencies that slowed mission-critical
Computer Aided Design (CAD) applications when accessing remote engineering
files.
The company evaluated different WAN optimization solutions and discovered
that most vendors required an overlay network that would interfere with
their existing sophisticated network operations. The Cisco WAAS solution
offered RS&H the network transparency they needed to be easily integrated
into their WAN infrastructure and not interfere with their voice over IP
(VoIP) phone deployment as well as their security policies.
"Our teams of engineers depend on a highly distributed network to
complement their work style. They now see LAN-like performance for large
file transfers after initial access, regardless of the physical location of
the files being accessed by the applications," said Harold Hamm, vice
president of Information Technology for RS&H. "Cisco WAAS solution gives us
a comprehensive solution that transparently stores and accelerates content,
while minimizing traffic to address our business challenges without adding
significant cost or time delays."
With the WAAS solution deployed, teamwork and collaboration among
geographically dispersed RS&H colleagues has been visibly improved. The IT
group is easily managing the Cisco WAN optimization solution because it
integrates into its existing network and scales to thousands of nodes as
the company adds employees or opens new offices. The Cisco WAAS auto
discovery, predefined application policies, and central management and
control features have saved their IT managers time and increased their
ability to manage and secure vital corporate intellectual property.
Travel Leader Centralizes IT, Speeds Applications, Increases Productivity
Sabre Holdings Corporation, a global industry leader that retails travel
products and provides distribution and technology solutions for the travel
industry, was challenged to protect the critical business information on
employee desktop and laptop computers in more than 100 remote locations
across 45 countries. The company had limited WAN bandwidth that slowed
down performance of business applications when shared with their IP
communications applications. Cisco WAAS increased the access performance
for remote offices and reduced their bandwidth usage by 20 percent to
enable Sabre to easily protect their business critical data.
"Cisco has market-leading technology in the WAN optimization area, and my
end users loved the results," says David Gula, manager of Telephony and
Data Services within the global Sabre Holdings' IS organization. "The Cisco
WAAS solution provided application acceleration features and total network
transparency to our end users which allowed us to reduce remote file
downloads from 20 seconds to two seconds, and easily increase the network
performance without having to actually increase the network bandwidth."
Cisco WAAS acceleration features enabled Sabre to improve productivity of
remote end-users by increasing performance of business applications such as
Microsoft Outlook, Web portals, and FTP file access. With the Cisco WAAS
solution deployed in their data center and call centers, Sabre's 750
end-users noticed performance improvements of its CRM customer care
application which is critical to servicing their customers.
For more information on Cisco WAAS solutions and customers successes go to
www.cisco.com/go/waas.
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