SPAR Group Accelerates with Managed WAN Optimization Service from Telkom Powered by Expand Networks

Retail Giant deploys 900 sites with Expand Accelerators in Six Months & Enhances Business Productivity with WAN Optimization-as-a-Service



ROSELAND, N.J., Friday, November 5th 2010 [ME NewsWire]:

(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Expand Networks, (www.expand.com) the leader in WAN optimization for branch office consolidation and virtualization has been chosen by SPAR Group, in conjunction with Africa’s largest Telco provider, Telkom SA, to deliver a managed WAN optimization service. This announcement closely follows the launch of Expand Networks’ MSP partner program and sees Expand’s technology successfully accelerating applications across SPAR’s 900 locations in South Africa. Choosing WAN Optimization as part of a managed service, SPAR has successfully extended its communications investment to optimize productivity benefits.


Fast and resilient communications across SPAR’s supply chain is critical to ensuring high levels of service and convenience are delivered to customers. Greg Hay, Group Networks Services Manager for SPAR, explains, “With so much time-critical data traveling over the network, we found that some web-based applications, particularly business banking sites, were experiencing slow responses, and in some cases remote support to stores was also slow and inconsistent. We knew we needed to optimize bandwidth between our headquarters, distribution centres and stores to mitigate WAN latency and congestion over our satellite links. A managed optimization service with our existing and trusted WAN provider, Telkom, proved the most cost-effective solution.”


Mel Lachenicht, acting Managing Executive for Corporate Customer Solutions at Telkom commented; “We worked closely with Greg Hay and his team in order to develop a WAN optimization service that would meet SPAR’s network performance and management needs. SPAR evaluated a number of vendors before choosing Expand. For Telkom, the key was to ensure that the Expand Accelerators could integrate with, and work efficiently alongside, Telkom technology, which it does.”


Greg Hay explains, “Expand was one of many vendor solutions we evaluated during this process, including Riverbed and Cisco. Expand Networks expertise in optimizing both fixed and satellite links was key in the decision process. During the proof of concept, Expand easily delivered on our technical expectations, which made it a simple decision to commit to the full implementation.”


The deployment of the entire solution to 900 SPAR sites was completed in six months. Owing to the Expand Accelerators ease of configuration in large network environments, this was an exceptionally rapid deployment considering SPAR’s national store coverage. Results were immediate; a number of the group’s top retailers quickly gave very positive responses to the solution as user experience improved dramatically.


Expand Networks’ Byte level Caching, Optimization & Acceleration techniques, immediately realized a reduction in repetitive traffic flowing across the network, such as common websites, antivirus updates and Windows patches, while Expand’s Layer 7 monitoring and QoS has provided the visibility to assess exactly what traffic is passing through links and then, more importantly, control it.


“Expand in conjunction with Telkom have delivered a superb solution in a very short space of time for WAN optimization which we would recommend to businesses with a large number of sites on low bandwidth networks such as satellite,” explains Greg Hay.


Adam Davison, Corporate VP of Sales and Marketing at Expand Networks concludes, “WAN Optimization-as-a-Service provides a solution which offers better use of IT resource while reducing IT costs. This deployment is a great example of how Expand Networks, with its close telco partnerships and newly released MSP Subscription partner program, is successfully enhancing user experience while providing extended returns on network investments for end users.”


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Cohesive Communications
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