Waltons
Waltons has experienced a 50% reduction in bandwidth utilization, with the greatest benefits in email, http, SQL and RDP traffic.
Challenges
- Improve application transaction times over the wide area network without increasing bandwidth capacity
Benefits
- Avoided a costly bandwidth upgrade
- 2-3x improvement in file download times
- 50% reduction in bandwidth utilization
- Improved employee collaboration and productivity
Overview
Waltons was founded in 1949 and is currently the largest and only national office products supplier in Southern Africa. In 1960, Waltons pioneered the stationery distribution industry in South Africa by establishing a network of branches in commercial and industrial areas and introducing the concept of delivery on account. In 1997, Waltons became part of the Bidvest Group – one of the largest South African owned industrial companies listed on the JSE Securities Exchange South Africa.
Waltons has five regional offices and over 100 branch offices located across South Africa, Namibia and Mozambique. Each regional office provides a range of services – including IT services – to 15 to 40 branch offices. The company had embarked upon an IT consolidation project and centralized Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint to the five regional offices. Following this consolidation program users at Waltons’ local branch offices began to experience severe delays when attempting to access html, ERP, Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint files via the wide area network (WAN).
Solution
- 70 Riverbed Steelhead appliances
Bandwidth is very costly in South Africa, and upgrading 90% of our bandwidth links was too expensive to contemplate. We needed an alternative solution that would be cost effective and easy to implement and manage.
Laurence Slotow, National IT Manager
Waltons
Now that we have Riverbed WAN optimization installed, we can look to implement more projects that will deliver a range of benefits back to the business.
Laurence Slotow, National IT Manager
Waltons
