SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - June 28, 2007) - Cisco® (
NASDAQ:
CSCO) today announced that
it has passed another milestone in the rapidly evolving wide area network
(WAN) optimization market with the deployment of its 1000th customer.
Since launching its Wide Area Applications Services (WAAS) solution in
September 2006, Cisco has seen broad adoption of its product across
multiple industries, helping customers to solve IT challenges such as
branch office application performance, remote backup and server
consolidation.
Cisco WAAS is a powerful application-acceleration and solution for branch
offices that helps optimize the performance of any TCP-based application
operating in a wide-area network (WAN) environment. This allows information
technology (IT) organizations to consolidate costly distributed servers and
storage into centrally managed data centers and to deploy new applications
centrally, while still offering LAN-like application performance for remote
users.
"WAN optimization is no longer a luxury; it's a requirement. Increasingly,
IT decision-makers want the option to integrate WAN optimization and
application acceleration into a single branch-office device," says Robin
Gareiss, executive vice president and senior founding partner of Nemertes
Research. "Already, 17% of organizations are using all-in-one devices, and
55% are using WAN optimization. Moving forward, they want devices to
provide switching/routing, security, voice over IP, optimization, and WAFS.
Vendors who can provide these capabilities independently -- and as part of
an integrated solution -- will end up on the short lists of enterprises
assessing the market."
Cisco WAAS has experienced a rapid market adoption rate across multiple
industry sectors, including finance, healthcare and manufacturing, while
addressing multiple IT initiatives. The technology has been proven in
large-scale enterprises, with key customers deploying Cisco WAAS at 100+
sites. Cisco is the only vendor to offer a variety of hardware form
factors for its solution, including stand-alone appliances as well as
modules that can be integrated into the widely deployed Cisco Integrated
Services Router (ISR) series.
Speeding up Healthcare Services
Cisco WAAS has helped Banner Health, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona,
speed application performance across 20 hospitals and other medical
facilities that offer an array of services including inpatient/outpatient
hospital care, home and hospice care, nursing registries, surgery centers,
laboratories and rehabilitation centers. Applications benefiting from
Cisco WAAS include McKesson application suite for nursing, MTS DELFT for
PACS, Cerner suite of clinical applications, Misis Laboratory Information
System, MEDICS pharmacy and Siemens MED Series for medical imaging, Lawson
for materials and people management, and Kronos for workforce management.
Banner Health selected Cisco WAAS to accelerate the application performance
of Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) and to minimize WAN
bandwidth usage. According to Steve Rains, system director, information
technology, Banner Health Western Region, Cisco WAAS achieved superior
performance results over other vendor's offerings by reducing latency and
bandwidth consumption, improving throughput, centralizing management, and
providing transparent out-of-path network integration.
"Before moving to Cisco WAAS, our bandwidth would spike to 100 percent
during the day, but we've been able to decrease that to 40 percent," says
Rains. "The product's transparency, which preserves our existing
monitoring and security infrastructure, and centralized management with
the ability to characterize the traffic according to days, months, traffic
type, as well as effective throughput per application, have all been a real
plus for us."
Increased Performance and IT Consolidation for Financial Services
In the financial services industry, Cisco WAAS is supporting data center
and application consolidation and improving branch office printing
performance at Fulton Financial Corp., a $14.7 billion regional financial
holding company headquartered in Lancaster, Penn. Fulton provides a
variety of financial services throughout 12 affiliates in Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey and Virginia.
To simplify management, Fulton's IT team is dedicated to maintaining a
centralized and consistent infrastructure across headquarters and affiliate
locations. The most acute problem facing Fulton was the amount of time it
took to print documents delivered by Citrix Presentation Server. Although
the company has a 6Mbps MPLS network connection to a regional affiliate
office in Virginia Beach,WAN bandwidth was constantly saturated at 80-100
percent and it took up to one hour to print large loan application
documents in the branch office.
"Upgrading bandwidth was cost prohibitive, inefficient and non-scalable,
and installing and managing local servers just for print jobs violates our
server and application centralization strategy," says Barth Bailey, vice
president of network infrastructure and security for Fulton Financial.
"With Cisco WAAS, we've maintained our centralized and standardized IT
infrastructure while ensuring LAN-like application performance for branch
offices. We are seeing 75-80 percent response-time reduction for print
jobs, and our bandwidth consumption went down to 30 percent of the 6Mbps
link, which allows us to avoid a bandwidth upgrade altogether."
Increased Operational Efficiencies for Worldwide Manufacturing
Nanometrics Inc., a leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of
high-performance process control metrology systems used in semiconductor
manufacturing, is deploying Cisco WAAS in its offices worldwide. Cisco
WAAS has been instrumental in lowering the company's overall operational
costs associated with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and reducing IT expenses
by enabling branch office IT centralization into the data center, including
centralized applications, a single repository for all data, and
single-version control.
"The deployment of Cisco WAAS has resulted in significant cost savings to
Nanometrics' worldwide operation, and will deliver continued ROI going
forward, " says Dave Kizer, director of information technologies,
Nanometrics. Nanometrics selected Cisco WAAS appliances as well as modules
in the Cisco Integrated Services Router series, for reliable integration
throughout its international offices, including Korea, China, Japan,
Taiwan, Singapore, and the U.K. Cisco WAAS has enabled a dramatic
improvement for the company's Microsoft Dynamics CRM application, as well
as providing LAN-like response times for Microsoft Exchange and Solidworks
CAD file access.
"We replaced an existing WAN optimization solution with Cisco WAAS because
it gave us better performance with a much lower total cost of ownership,"
says Kizer. "Cisco's transparent and reliable integration with
branch-office routers minimizes our installation and management costs, and
its seamless integration with our voice network further reduces our ongoing
management efforts in QoS and application performance monitoring. Since
the Cisco solution uses a single set of robust QoS policy on the router
that is not overwritten by the WAN optimization solution, we are protected
against VoIP performance degradation and assured of voice integrity.
Moreover, Cisco WAAS network transparency enables us to maintain granular
control of each application individually, rather than just dealing with one
big opaque data stream and losing application visibility."
Bissell Homecare, Inc., a floor care innovator and international
manufacturer of home cleaning products, is relying upon Cisco WAAS to speed
replication data from its Web-based Product Life Cycle Management (PLM)
solution. This solution is used for all R&D and product manufacturing
purposes, between Bissell's Grand Rapids, Mich., headquarters and its
manufacturing facility in China.
According to Paul Babcock, manager of network and computer operations, it
used to take 16-24 hours to replicate data from the central site in the
United States to the local site in China. "During our migration to the PLM
product, we had to move 50 gigabytes of data across the ocean," says
Babcock. "Since it was a single TCP connection, we couldn't even fill up
the 5-Mbps pipe that we were paying for. Clearly, the WAN latency problem
was also causing low IT asset utilization."
The Bissell IT team selected Cisco WAAS, which features inline modules that
are easily deployed by remote technicians in just 15 minutes without
disrupting operational routers and switches. "It now takes roughly 20 to
30 minutes to replicate data changes across the WAN, compared to 5-6 hours
before. We're extremely satisfied with the results, and the performance
increase will be even greater if changes are more substantial," says
Babcock.
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