Bolivian National Bank Achieves Savings of $250,000 with Expand Networks WAN Optimization

Expand Networks www.expand.com, the leader in optimizing WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualization, today announced that Banco Nacional de Bolivia (BNB) has successfully improved business performance and achieved significant cost savings with Expand Networks Advanced WAN Optimization technology.

Implementing Expand Accelerators across its distributed environment, BNB has brought its employees into virtual proximity of their centralized applications and services, successfully enhancing user experience, increasing business productivity and extending returns on network investments.

Operating across 8 locations across the country, BNB has over 37 local offices. With application and data held centrally, BNB’s 1,300 branch office employees rely heavily upon the WAN for the delivery of its critical business applications. Following BNB’s own business growth and an increase in the economic activities of the country, its existing bandwidth provision struggled to cope with the rising numbers of complex applications travelling over the WAN.

Roberto Delgadillo Poepsel, national systems manager at BNB explains, “Increasing volumes of data being passed between our branches via such tight bandwidth links seriously impacted productivity levels. Our employees experienced slow performance of centralized applications, such as Intranet and e-mail. We also found that the quality of VoIP delivery very poor.”

BNB set up a centralized team to manage WAN traffic in accordance with Quality of Service (QoS) rules but having done so, quickly realized that QoS alone was not sufficient to solve the problem. Delgadillo continues, “We soon knew that this could only be a temporary solution, and we needed a more comprehensive optimization approach that would put a stop to the huge expenditure being wasted on increasing bandwidth and enhance user experience.”

BNB looked to adopt a WAN optimization strategy that could offer visibility and control as well as high network performance levels. As a financial institution, network security was also a key concern for BNB, and one which Expand Networks’ technology was able to satisfy, as Delgadillo explains, “Expand offered the best performance infrastructure for our network, taking away the need for continuingly increasing bandwidth investment, whilst its unique ability to guarantee security with the IP-Sec protocol was a key factor. Other technologies we looked at couldn’t provide the level of speed and performance that we experienced from Expand.”

Following an evaluation process, BNB chose to pilot Expand Networks technology, and found the results spoke for themselves. “In addition to security, other solutions simply did not offer the necessary compression we required for this project. Expand also offered the fastest RoI. This, compiled with the performance, security and flexibility of the solution, made it a simple choice.”

Following the success of the pilot, BNB chose to implement the Expand Accelerators between its central office, branch sites and local offices. The Expand solution has delivered a rapid RoI, with BNB saving over $86,000 in 9 months. Delgadillo continues, “Our new Expand Accelerators are giving users the impression they have a greater bandwidth, without having to pay for it. The performance speed of network operations is up 80%, meaning the business is running so much more efficiently and productivity levels are at an all time high. We have saved a huge $86,000 in less than one year. We estimate that these savings will continue to increase as time goes on and expect that a further $287,000 will be saved to be put to better use.”

Adam Davison, corporate VP sales & marketing at Expand Networks, says, “As users and their applications move further apart, business performance can suffer. Our unique integrated technology delivers a virtual proximity experience designed to close this gap through the delivery of virtual bandwidth. BNB is a great example of how our next generation compression and acceleration techniques can take limited WAN Links and fully maximize throughputs - on the exact same infrastructure.”

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