NPS saves £600k and achieves instant ROI with Teneo

Teneo, a leading infrastructure optimisation specialist, has installed Riverbed Steelhead appliances to optimise NPS Group’s traffic and enable a consolidated IT infrastructure, saving over £600,000 in cumulative costs during the install period alone.

NPS has 30 UK offices delivering a range of property services. It has over 2,500 employees using over 115 applications from basic office suites to intranet and web- based applications. The main types of network traffic are RTP (IP Telephony), streaming media, HTTP/S, SQL, active directory, CIFS (file transfers) and email.

In 2007, NPS needed to restructure and consolidate its IT infrastructure following a period of rapid growth. Users were processing more transactions and making more data requests for files or emails which were previously served by local infrastructure but were all now moving over the WAN.

Without a solution in place, NPS was unable to backup its servers overnight and was suffering from congested networks and diminishing application performance. AutoCAD files in particular were nightmarishly slow. Traffic needed to be optimised to make consolidation possible. NPS turned to Teneo which recommended Riverbed Steelhead appliances.

Teneo offered a free trial of Riverbed Steelhead to be installed across the slowest VPN sites linking two offices in Kendal. This provided a snapshot of the impact that the appliances could make to the organization as a whole. The trial generated a dramatic improvement in application performance between the two offices and users felt as if they were getting the performance of a local infrastructure. The trial clearly demonstrated that the Steelheads would provide the performance needed to move to a consolidated infrastructure.

Rollout throughout the company enabled a consolidated IT infrastructure and provided instant ROI and identifiable savings of over £600k* during the install period compared to the cumulative costs of the alternative increase in bandwidth and WAN services to achieve the same result. There has been a total data reduction of 96 per cent with capacity savings of up to 96 per cent and performance increases of over 25 Mbps have been made.

NPS' data centre now provides services to remote offices without having servers on site. In addition Steelheads have provided increased data security. If a link goes down the Steelheads read any data. The Steelheads enable NPS to perform backup and data replication processes with even greater frequency and regularity than before, which of course further enhances data security.

Commenting on the installation, which has recently been shortlisted for a Channel Network Award, Shaun Morgan, northern data centre manager, NPS Group commented:

“The annual spend on WAN was already £220,000 and rising as new offices were commissioned. We turned to Teneo because of its Riverbed expertise and clear value-add to the solution. It provided us with highly skilled technical staff and proved to be a fantastic partner to work with. The communication lines were constantly open and enabled us to fast track implementation. The solution immediately delivered a return on investment.”

Teneo was named by Riverbed Technology as its Northern European Reseller of the Year for the second year running in the summer of 2008 in recognition for Teneo's sales growth and level of understanding and support it provides to its customers.

Riverbed Technology is the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS) solutions for companies worldwide. Riverbed Steelhead appliances accelerate application performance typically by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times over the WAN, and reduce WAN bandwidth utilisation typically by 60 to 95 per cent.

The Steelheads enable an existing legacy WAN infrastructure to replicate vast amounts of data. The Steelhead solution can allow an existing E1 or DS-3 WAN infrastructure to efficiently and cost-effectively transport hundreds of Gigabytes of multiple Terabytes of data, within a matter of hours.

James Hall, marketing director, Teneo added: “NPS provides a clear illustration of the results that can be achieved with Riverbed. Not just in terms of network optimisation, but also data security and impressive cost savings.”