Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

Austrade doubles bandwidth capacity with app acceleration rollout

To be used in more than 60 countries
Page:

The Australian Trade Commission (Austrade) is implementing application acceleration technology across its 119 international offices for completion by June, 2008.

Austrade has already installed the Steelhead appliances from Riverbed Technology in half of its offices including Sydney, Canberra and all of the Americas (the US, Canda and South America).

It has also purchased 250 licences for mobile client software for staff who travel frequently or do not have permanent offices.

Sitting within the federal government portfolio of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Austrade provides advice, market intelligence and support to Australian companies involved in exporting, as well as businesses interested in foreign investment. It operates in more than 60 countries.

Geoff Harders, global manager, service delivery and systems support for Austrade, said the deployment will overcome many of the issues facing locations with limited bandwidth by speeding up download time and optimising application performance. "Austrade's business is all about collaboration and connecting Australian exporters with overseas buyers and suppliers," he said.

"It's critical that our central repository of information - often containing sizeable files - can be quickly and easily accessed by our staff, so they can then help our clients. "This will enhance our ability to effectively deliver over fairly mediocre data communications capabilities in terms of bandwidth and latency.

"This increases our ability to provide more complex information to employees, meaning they can better support Australian companies and ultimately increase Australia's level of outbound trade." Many of Austrade's employees are mobile workers who are based in home or serviced offices. As a result Riverbed's mobile client software weighed heavily in the agency's decision when selecting a vendor. Harder, who works in both Melbourne and Canberra, said the software allows notebook computers to share the same speed and security benefits as the desktop computers.

Depending on which applications he uses, it can almost double bandwidth capacity due to traffic optimisation capabilities.

"For example, the other day it took me about an hour to download a training video from my home office," Harder said.

"But once Steelhead Mobile was installed it could generate the file almost instantly.

"The ability to speed up download times is a major factor in increased productivity, not just for me, but for all our employees across the globe." Austrade's offices range from one or two person set-ups in remote locations to offices of more than 200 in places such as Sydney and Canberra.

Harder said the solution is suitable for both small and large offices and can be configured through a central management console for quick deployment.

Page:

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: Austrade, Australian Trade Commission, Riverbed, Speed

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Optimised Data Protection for VMware® Environments with Symantec NetBackup™ Appliances
    VMware® remains the most widely deployed virtualisation solution. The explosive growth of VMware infrastructure in organisations both large and small has enabled corporations to more fully exploit their hardware investments. With multiple virtual machines running on few physical hardware nodes, hardware costs are reduced, as well as space, power, and cooling requirements. This white paper discusses in more detail how VMware environments can be protected with the NetBackup appliances. Read more.
    Learn more »
  • Virtualise, Manage, Backup, Consolidate
    Datacenter sprawl is one of the larger challenges that datacenter managers are facing today. Over time, applications, servers, and storage can create many unique architectures across the IT infrastructure. This can introduce complexity, increase costs, and compromise business-critical application performance and availability. Read on.
    Learn more »
  • Get the Whole Picture Why Most Organizations Miss User Response Monitoring—and What to Do About It
    You can be armed with vast amounts of performance metrics, but if you don’t know what users are actually experiencing, you don’t have the real performance picture. While this measure is critical, it is one many organizations fail to consistently capture. This guide looks at the challenges of user response monitoring, and it shows how you can overcome these challenges and start to get a real handle on your infrastructure performance and how it impacts your users’ experience.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.