In this case study published in Business Management magazine, a global media company deployed virtual appliance software to reduce its application response time over the WAN and dramatically increase ROI.

The Lay of the Land

The global media company intended to deploy a virtualized web-based enterprise content management (ECM) application over the WAN using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and VMware ESX. The media company had made a significant investment in MOSS for ECM and web-based collaboration and needed to ensure that the WAN applications integrated seamlessly with the overall virtualization strategy.

The Problem

The global media company’s MOSS users were geographically distributed, working remotely in small branch offices or from a home office. As MOSS users can connect to distributed MOSS content and application to perform all operations remotely, network bandwidth and latency was an issue. The global media company found that latency issues were causing slow application response time during file modification and transfer actions across the WAN. These latency costs were directly attributable to lost productivity and higher development costs.

The Solution 

The global media company decided to start with a virtual appliance software model to address WAN performance limitations and reduce its network optimization infrastructure costs between its New York based data center and branch offices in London and Singapore. They chose virtual appliance software that runs on industry-standard servers and combines application acceleration with virtualization. This was one of the requirements for the media company in selecting a virtual appliance software vendor; the vendor had to support the existing virtualization investment, leverage existing hardware and not add any net new hardware.

The Results

The global media company saw an improvement in MOSS remote access performance resulting in $7.7 million in savings the first year and a breakeven on its virtual appliance software spend after just two months.  To read more about this case study and find out how you can reduce your network optimization infrastructure costs, download the whitepaper, aCelera/Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) Evaluation: Global Media Company.