"With the WAN acceleration solution provided by Generation-e, Acer staff around the country now have the same access to fast business productivity tools. There is now easy management, improved efficiency and cost reduction in the entire network infrastructure of Acer. This technology is one of the reasons why it won’t be long before Acer is the #1 PC/server vendor in Australia."  Patrick Wu, IT Manager

Challenge

Acer Computer Australia is the #3 PC/Server vendor in Australia and the fastest growing vendor in the industry with a compound annual growth rate of over 35%.

Acer staff on remote sites across Australia & NZ complained about very poor application performance across the company’s wide area network. Acer IT had a different problem - they were trying to support their users but had put servers on each site to partially solve the WAN performance problem. It was only a partial solution because users still had to access centralised data at head office. Acer upgraded bandwidth on some sites but it made minimal difference to application performance because of the high latency on their trans-National and trans-Tasman links (Latency= how long it takes to get data across a link and is dependent on distance). The high latency limited the throughput they were able to achieve on their WAN links.

IT Environment

Acer IT had to support Microsoft Windows and Lotus Notes servers at each site. With offices in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne (2 sites), Sydney (3 sites), Brisbane, Hobart, Auckland, having a server on the site is good for users but a challenge for IT as they need to back them up, configure and maintain them – with no IT people on site! Acer IT had to rely on local office staff at those sites to assist with those functions. Another challenge was that Acer also had to upgrade Lotus Notes servers on each site and the license fees are expensive.

Solution

Acer trialled Juniper WAN Accelerators from Generation-e between their Sydney data centre and Perth office. When the trial concluded, Perth staff lobbied hard and fast to get their WAN performance back again and an order was placed to upgrade all Acer sites.

Generation-e installed Juniper WAN Accelerators on each site. This has increased the WAN performance better than 10-fold with no increase in WAN costs. It enables them to centralise Lotus Notes to their data centre, the license saving here alone paid for the WAN Accelerators. Over time, they will also be able to remove the distributed file servers and centralise to their data centre because of the dramatic increase in WAN performance they now have. The solution makes it far easier for IT to manage the centralised infrastructure and users have benefited from far better performance on their applications.

Business Impact

The benefits of the solution to Acer:

• Increased network performance by 10-fold- with no increase in WAN costs.
• Improved staff productivity- The WAN acceleration dramatically improved staff productivity and morale at all sites as they felt they had the same access to the same business tools as everyone else in the organisation.
• Saved time and money- Consolidating servers into one server in Sydney meant their IT staff could maintain and manage it centrally. They save time and money not having to administer distributed servers around the country. They also saved on license fees.

With their staff around the country now having the same access to fast business productivity tools, it won’t be long before Acer is in the #1 position.