Budget Bandwidth

Cut your bandwidth demand and you'll not only save real dollars, youmight also improve performance. Irving H. "Bubba" Tyler, vicepresident and CIO of Quaker Chemical, found a way to do both usingcheap (less than $100,000 for five) WAN data compression appliancesfrom Peribit Networks. Quaker, a Conshohocken, Pa.-based producer andmanufacturer of specialty chemicals for the steel and automotiveindustries, has 44 offices and 14 manufacturing plants scatteredaround the globe, connected by everything from frame relay to T1s. Inthe midst of rolling out a completely Web-based ERPERP system, Tylerrealized he needed a better solution to his bandwidth problem thanjust adding capacity. Alles zu ERP auf CIO.de

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