Ipanema Technologies, a leader in application traffic management systems for wide area networks (WANs), today announced that one of the largest producers and distributors of resilient floorings worldwide has implemented its solution to guarantee critical application performance.
The Tarkett Group is an innovative and global company, present in more than 50 countries and operating 26 production centers in 11 countries. Tarkett's WAN is composed of 80 sites including four data centers and 25 production sites. The network is used by highly critical applications like SAP and Cognos. Following several mergers and acquisitions, the IT department realized it was time to review its network management environment.
In order to optimize the network costs and performance, Tarkett decided to migrate its WAN to MPLS using Class of Service (CoS). CoS manages network traffic by grouping similar types of traffic (for example, e-mail, streaming video, voice) together and treating each type as a class with its own level of service priority. Unfortunately, CoS proved to be an insufficient approach, as it does not permit dynamic application performance management according to business priorities. Furthermore, Tarkett found it could no longer exploit existing traffic measurement solutions on the frame relay network, generating a complete loss of visibility of WAN application use and performance.
To address these issues, Tarkett implemented a WAN optimization solution from Ipanema, which was administered by managed service provider e-Qual. Some 38 sites were equipped with physical IP engines and another 40 with virtual IP|engines.
Tarkett defined SAP, Mouvex, Cartesis Magnitude, Cognos and Pivotal applications as "˜top priorities.' Ipanema's solution now allows Tarkett to go beyond the 3 MPLS CoS. The network teams use Ipanema reports daily for an overall view of the networked applications performance, as well as technical reports for a proactive helpdesk.
Change management is now considerably simplified; operations are accelerated while the total cost of traffic management is minimized. The technical and high level reports enable Tarkett to know the application performance for the whole network and to proactively manage any problems. Because of this, end-users complaints have completely disappeared.
"Ipanema enables us to control exactly what occurs on our network," said Ingo Klever, IT director for Tarkett. "Thanks to the optimum use of our bandwidth and the prioritization of our critical applications to guarantee performance, we are able to reduce our telecom costs by avoiding line upgrades. We are completely satisfied with the applications visibility and prioritization results and can no longer work without the Ipanema optimization solution."
Houda Chabir Robert, VP North America at Ipanema Technologies, said, "We are excited that Tarkett now has full visibility of its WAN usage and performance. With Ipanema, companies like Tarkett can obtain application performance guarantees, easy rightsizing and seamless change management capabilities, while optimizing costs. Most importantly, they can guarantee a good quality of experience for their end users. Our technology is designed to help align network resources with business strategies and identify bottlenecks affecting productivity. Our solution aligns network performance to the applications that are most important to the enterprise's business."
About Ipanema Technologies (www.ipanematech.com)
Ipanema is a provider of advanced application traffic management solutions that align the network with business goals. Network integrators market Ipanema's Business Network Optimization solutions to enterprises, while telecom service providers and network managed service providers offer those as a service.
The Business Network Optimization solution is simple, automated and scalable and allows enterprises to easily control, guarantee and accelerate their critical application performance regardless of network conditions. It relies on Ipanema's Autonomic Networking System to provide: full visibility of application flows over the network, global and dynamic optimization of network resources, transparent application acceleration, network application governance functions and scalable service delivery capabilities. Ipanema's Business Network Optimization solutions are deployed in more than 75 countries. Its customers include large organizations such as Leroy Merlin, Sodiaal, Altadis, Sephora, Brittany Ferries, Bongrain, Michael Page, NH Hoteles, SGS, Nespresso, Clariant, TNT, L'Oréal, Cap Gemini, Henkel, the French Army, Sanofi-Avenits, Europcar, Rhodia, Lexmark, etc. Ipanema is based in France, the U.S., Germany and UK.
