Pharmaceuticals companyPfizeris running a pilot project
across three datacentres and six remote sites to optimise its wide
area network, as part of a project to improve the performance of
software applications across the company.
Speaking at the Burton Group Catalyst conference last week, Ron
Rapp, associate director in Pfizer's worldwide technology
engineering division, said the company had experienced performance
issues in applications including e-mail, file and print services,
and finance and human resources systems.
Pfizer is rolling out
wide area network optimisation technology for a series of
30-day trials across sites in India, Costa Rica, South Africa,
Romania and the US. The trails cover end-users in research and
development, manufacturing, sales and finance.
The numbers of users at the sites involved in the pilot range
from 75 to 10,000.
Feedback from end-users has been key to the project, said Rapp.
"We need to demonstrate to the business that we can reduce
bandwidth," he said.
Rapp plans to use the pilot to develop a business case to
demonstrate how buying bandwidth optimisation hardware would avoid
expensive network upgrades by allowing the company to make better
use of existing bandwidth.
He has used a web-based end-user survey based on a methodology
known as Apdex, which captures
how end-users rate the responsiveness of an application.
Pfizer ran the survey before optimising the wide area network at
the pilot site, and it will be running the survey again after the
project is complete to measure any perceived improvement in the
responsiveness of applications.
From the most recent data, taken on 22 October, Rapp said he was
seeing a 2.7-times improvement on application performance across
the wide area network.