ACADEMIA

Middle East and Africa offices of global advertising agency overcome bandwidth limitations

One of the world’s largest creative advertising agencies – Leo Burnett – is achieving greater levels of productivity across its Middle East and Africa offices thanks to Exinda’s next-generation WAN optimization and application assurance solution.

As a creative agency with a huge client portfolio, having an efficient network is critical to the daily smooth operation of the business. Leo Burnett sends large amounts of data across its network in the form of graphics, adverts, videos and presentations, much of which is often uploaded by FTP for access by clients or third parties. This becomes even more of a challenge in areas where bandwidth is limited or prohibitively expensive.

To improve on network performance in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region, Re:Sources – the internal IT department of parent company Publicis – is embarking on a programme of standardising Exinda WAN optimization and application assurance technology across its regional offices, as Sami Mneimneh, Regional Network & Infrastructure Director, Re:Sources Middle East & Africa explains.

“We first used Exinda in our Beirut office. Beirut is a challenging territory because of high bandwidth costs. We tested the Exinda technology and were very happy with the performance, which was great from day one. But not only was the system very simple and easy to manage, but the improved visibility on links was a revelation which helped us to better understand how our network was being used.

“Another Exinda test at the Cairo office helped to assure performance of critical applications over non-critical recreational applications and improve network performance without the need to upgrade the Internet connection. The Cairo office was extremely happy with the outcome and so, on the back of those two successful tests in very challenging environments, we decided to standardise our local country MPLS network across the entire region by rolling out Exinda optimization and acceleration technology at all offices.”

The first stage of the rollout is complete with Cairo, Beirut and remote offices using products from Exinda’s Edge suite, the first and only integrated WAN Optimization suite architected specifically for the increasing demands of branch office networks.

“Several key applications have been successfully optimized.” continues Sami Mneimneh. “We have managed to achieve between 30% - 70% reduction in file transfer time, depending on the file type, plus great improvements in remotely accessing SQL databases which is a critical function across the entire business.”

“WAN optimization and application assurance is increasingly important for many enterprises.” added Adam Davision , VP EMEA Sales at Exinda. “As enterprise increasingly takes advantage of remote working, and with greater amounts of critical data being transferred across networks, businesses need to ensure that their networks are operating as efficiently as possible and are not being stretched to capacity. Our policy based WAN optimization intelligently applies acceleration and containment based on the priorities of the business. We are pleased that a business of the calibre and size of Leo Burnett is benefiting from our WAN optimization 2.0 solution.”