Background

FOSS is the world’s leading provider of analytical instruments for the food, agricultural, chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Today, 85% of the world’s milk production, 80% of grain traded on the world market and 75% of the world’s beer production is tested using FOSS analytical solutions. The technology that FOSS provides is designed to improve their customer’s profit, product quality and food safety.

With headquarters in Denmark, 20 sites around the world and some 1200 end users, FOSS is currently experiencing considerable growth in regions stretching from China to the Americas.

The Challenge

Heading up the Global IT support team of eight people at the headquarters in Hillerød, Denmark, is Michael Bornak, IT Support Manager. Michael is responsible for managing the performance of all applications on the network, and managing the local support teams in each of the worldwide locations.

In this fast-paced, highly competitive market it’s essential that all FOSS’s global offices have access to the applications that are core to the running of their business, such as its CRM solution and SAP, from wherever they are located.

Over the last few years, FOSS has undergone a process of server and IT infrastructure consolidation; FOSS is deploying SAP around the world to run on a Citrix platform and is consolidating its email servers in order to streamline its operations. The impact of this centralisation and consolidation is that it needed to improve the stability of performance for its key business applications.

As Michael explains: “All our core applications are hosted and run from our Danish headquarters; the global offices connect to our headquarters over VPN links – in our newer offices these have bandwidth between 2Mbps – 4Mbps, however in some existing sites these links are just half a Mbps. The trade-off for the consolidation was that whilst we could improve efficiencies by moving the core IT operations to Denmark, we had issues with the stability and performance of applications.”

The Solution

FOSS explored the options for a solution which could deliver network or application optimisation to mitigate these performance issues. “Upgrading the bandwidth was not an option; it would simply have been prohibitively costly so we looked for an alternative way of optimising performance.” Having evaluated a number of solutions, FOSS concluded that only the Blue Coat solution could offer the level of performance, optimisation and control that they required to meet their objectives.

Originally, FOSS ran a trial of Blue Coat ProxySG appliances between its sites in Denmark and Sweden and the results were compelling. Michael explains, “We were extremely impressed with the initial results and our users noticed a considerable difference in the speed and performance of applications. In addition, we found that we could save as much as 70% on our bandwidth, which was an incredible improvement.”

Blue Coat appliances have now been installed at all of FOSS’s global offices – some 20 sites around the world, where users have been equally impressed. For example, employees in China were experiencing considerable issues with downloading and synchronising data from the central CRM system. With Blue Coat’s solution it’s now much faster to do a transfer of the data to the Beijing offices to ensure they have the most up-to-date customer information.

Michael continues: “Likewise, we use a Microsoft SharePoint document management system within our internal portal to share sales and technical notes between our global offices. Whereas in the past it would have taken upwards of a minute for one of the regional offices to download a word document, this can now be done in a matter of seconds.”

He continues: “As most applications are running over Citrix or are Web-based, all the normal traffic Blue Coat can optimize will benefit our branch offices, as many of them have low bandwidth compared to our head office in Denmark. When users are downloading a large amount of data, applications running over Citrix would perform badly and latency would be a problem.”

FOSS also now uses Microsoft System Centre Configuration Manager (SCCM) to deploy software and updates and relies on Blue Coat ProxySG appliances to optimize this traffic. If every client downloaded individual software updates from the Internet, instead of using one already cached locally by a Blue Coat appliance, a setup like this would not have been possible.

Supporting Web Use and Video Conferencing

Blue Coat’s solution is also used to support and enforce FOSS’s policy surrounding use of the Web. As Michael explains, “Although we have a fairly relaxed approach to employees’ use of the Web at work, we need to ensure that we have systems in place that ensure employees can’t access certain sites.”

FOSS’s policy is that it doesn’t allow video streaming other than for work purposes; however, the company is making increasing use of technology such as video for staff training, meetings and other forms of corporate communications. Using video reduces the amount of travelling which executives have to make. Michael explains “Before Blue Coat appliances were installed, we simply could not have used these types of applications and would have been faced with network congestion that would impact other business critical applications. Since we have regained so much bandwidth through our use of ProxySG appliances, we can ensure the bandwidth to provide quality video conferencing sessions and this means that we can operate more efficiently as a business.”

The Future

FOSS is now in the process of testing Blue Coat ProxyClientTM software – which is designed to optimise performance for remote workers wherever they are based. FOSS is currently testing this with remote and mobile users that need to access the CRM system and the results have been impressive, considerably reducing the time it takes to download centrally held data.

From the IT department’s perspective, the Blue Coat solution has transformed their day-to-day operations. Michael explains: “Quite simply, it means that we can focus on our primary tasks without dealing with performance issues. We have improved visibility of what is happening across the network and can block out unwanted traffic and we can also see when there is a bandwidth problem and prioritise business over recreational traffic. Our users have noticed the difference in performance and as a team we are better placed to react to ensure we make the best use of our network resources.”