Budget Bandwidth

Cut your bandwidth demand and you’ll not only save real dollars, you might also improve performance. Irving H. "Bubba" Tyler, vice president and CIO of Quaker Chemical, found a way to do both using cheap (less than $100,000 for five) WAN data compression appliances from Peribit Networks. Quaker, a Conshohocken, Pa.-based producer and manufacturer of specialty chemicals for the steel and automotive industries, has 44 offices and 14 manufacturing plants scattered around the globe, connected by everything from frame relay to T1s. In the midst of rolling out a completely Web-based ERP system, Tyler realized he needed a better solution to his bandwidth problem than just adding capacity.

"We were very hungry for simple, easy, low-cost ways to increase our bandwidth," he says, "[because] most of our existing [frame-relay] connections were at a limit." Quaker found the appliance solution to be cheaper in both dollars and in training costs than the other three options?paying for burst speeds, buying more capacity from the telecom carrier or a caching solution that would have required software, servers and more support. "With the appliance, we literally plugged in two cords, and we were done," Tyler explains.

Routing optimization appliances can be another quick win in the bandwidth category. John Benzinger, vice president of IT for FreeMarkets in Pittsburgh, a hosted sourcing and e-commerce auction services provider, says paying less than $100,000 for one such device from RouteScience Technologies yielded substantial cost savings, and more important, performance benefits.

The appliance, which identifies optimal network paths for return packet traffic back to customers, was easy to install and yielded a major improvement in page display times. "We had it installed within two days and were immediately seeing benefits," Benzinger says. "We wouldn’t have been able to provide the same level of service without it, and we also would have had to put more engineers on diagnosing end user problems."

Both Tyler and Benzinger advise CIOs to test bandwidth optimization solutions thoroughly before deploying them, however. The best of these devices can be put in listen-only mode so that staffers can evaluate their compression and routing recommendations, and likely bandwidth savings, before anything gets put into production. "Prove it to me. I want to experience it," says Tyler.

Fenwick and West’s Kesner, who also deployed a Peribit system, had similar advice: "Look under the hood, test it like crazy, and make sure it really works."

Talk About Savings

In addition to data savings, it’s also possible to find quickly cuttable costs in telecom space. Kesner, for example, deployed a Cisco software-based VPN application for 700 employees for $30,000. "It’s been a huge hit for us," Kesner says, "well out of proportion to the cost."