Customer Case Study
Cisco AVS accelerates application performance for branch and remote office employees.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
A global transportation leader, with more than 100,000 employees and 80 million customers, faced a challenging marketplace. Customer expectations were on the rise, yet competition continued to drive prices down. This industry titan needed to boost employee productivity quickly and do so in a cost-effective manner. With over 70,000 employees located in branch offices or remote locations, the main problem was slow Web-application performance. A single Web page took more than 90 seconds to download, whereas the industry standard was only 8 to 11 seconds per download.
This leader required a solution that optimized application performance across the wide area network (WAN), but did not increase IT investment or operating costs.
NETWORK SOLUTION
The IT department tried numerous WAN optimization solutions without success: TCP Port 80 optimization made the problem worse, compression dropped the delivery time to 57 seconds per page, and header caching reduced page delivery to 45 seconds. Ultimately, the only product to get the desired result was the Cisco AVS 3100 Series
Application Velocity System. Cisco AVS, deployed at the customer's data center, provided an integrated suite of end-to-end server and network management optimizations to improve enterprise application performance. Two unique AVS features, Delta Encoding and Adaptive Dynamic Caching, accelerated Web page delivery and generation by transmitting only data that had been changed. Cisco AVS eliminated redundancies between successive downloads of the same or similar Web pages, which dropped page delivery speeds down to 4 to 5 seconds per page, twice as fast as the industry standard.
BUSINESS RESULTS
In this industry's slim profit margin environment, the Cisco AVS 3100 Series improved application performance without adding IT resources or making changes to the existing IT infrastructure. In fact, the Cisco AVS solution was so stable and effective that the customer was able to retire several interim solutions and eliminate four Web servers, which significantly reduced existing IT operating costs. Branch and remote office employees increased their productivity due to faster application speeds, enabling this global leader to devote more of its resources to its demanding customer base.