Carlson Wagonlit Travel Implements Expand Networks for Data Center Consolidation

Business Wire, Dec 4, 2006

Expand's Compass Solution Improves Business Agility by Reducing Network Traffic and Bandwidth Demands, While Increasing Cost Efficiency

ROSELAND, N.J. -- Expand Networks (www.expand.com), a leading provider of application acceleration solutions over the WAN, and recently positioned in the Gartner's Leaders Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers 2006, today announced that Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT), the world's second-largest travel management company, has implemented Expand Networks technology in the Asia-Pacific region to increase its network's speed and application delivery and improve Quality of Service (QoS) while consolidating distributed IT services to a single data center.

CWT designs and implements travel management programs for clients in nearly 150 countries and generates annual sales of more than US $26 billion. The company's services include: online or full-service travel planning and reservations, traveler support services and security assistance, meetings and events, consulting and program optimization and procurement.

Asia Pacific expansion necessitates IT consolidation

To operate at maximum efficiency, CWT relies on key technologies and transaction processes to provide the highest levels of service and consistency. In 2005, the CWT IT team in the Asia-Pacific region recognized a need to respond to the company's ongoing global expansion and drive core business standardization. Without a re-alignment of IT capabilities, the pace and cost-effectiveness of new roll-outs would be compromised.

CWT had clear business goals: achieve service consistency and realize the operational efficiencies inherent with scale, while retaining the local flavor and client-focused service, which is the hallmark of the company's global success. To reach these goals, the IT leadership team determined a need to invest in centralized delivery capabilities.

"A key part of our Asia-Pacific strategy included the shift from locally managed, heterogeneous IT services to a centrally managed, standards-based Asia-Pacific Data Center," said Daniel Oertli, Vice President IT & Operations, CWT Asia Pacific. "Our key challenge was to re-think the resilience and performance characteristics that our network would require to enable a data center-focused vision. Our ideal solution would optimize our four key protocols: Wide Area File Services (WAFS), HTTP, MS Exchange and Citrix. We learned from our own extensive research that, by way of their flagship Compass Platform technology, Expand Networks was the only organization capable of providing a complete, future-proof solution in a single box. During our proof-of-concept testing, Expand Networks technology demonstrated its claims."

CWT completed this implementation in three stages over six months. CWT set up the Expand products in a hub-and-spoke network configuration, where Expand sits in the hub - the CWT Asia- Pacific data center - and at several CWT branches in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand and India. Core IT services delivered to the branch offices pass through the company's Expand-optimized network, providing faster application response times for WAN-delivered applications and lower bandwidth demands, as Expand's compression technology ensures redundant information is not sent multiple times.

"We achieved our key business goals in four weeks, resulting in a vastly improved delivery network," says Oertli. "Our network traffic was reduced by two-thirds and we obtained protocol-level visibility into the enterprise WAN. The Expand solution enabled CWT to successfully centralize and standardize key IT services. The benefits have been immediate."

"CWT is a forward-thinking, global company with heavy network usage that was able to identify bandwidth-hungry applications and prioritize business-critical solutions through a carefully configured Expand Network Compass Platform solution throughout the network," said Christopher Williams, Chief Marketing and Channels Officer, Expand Networks. "The Expand Compass tightly integrates multiple technologies and maps them to the business mandates, in this case business agility, resulting in improved user productivity and cost-effective IT management," he added.

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted October 2006 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Carlson Wagonlit Travel