Teneo enables more effective collaboration between offices at Gardner Stewart Architects
Published on: 20 February 2008
Teneo has helped one of the UK’s leading architects to dramatically improve speed of access to, and sharing of, large Computer Aided Design (CAD) drawings between staff in offices in Birmingham and London.
Gardner Stewart Architects had the specific problem of version control associated with plans caused by the fact that it was taking up to 45 minutes to download AutoCAD files across the corporate Wide Area Network (WAN) in order to make changes to architectural master plans and sub files. The frustration of staff was such that many had decided to save copies of plans locally and then send them between offices by email rather than storing them on the company’s central server in London.
The proliferation of local copies meant that version control became a much bigger issue and more often than not employees’ were finding themselves working on plans which were not the most recent, thereby wasting valuable time and resources.
Various solutions were investigated by the firm’s IT manager, Oliver Davis, including establishing a second server in its Birmingham office. But understandably there were concerns about the costs of maintaining and upgrading the additional IT equipment.
Davis also investigated establishing an SDSL leased line:
“Moving over to a dedicated leased line also looked like a costly option which we wanted to avoid. We decided not to go down this route after researching the power of WAN optimisation and application performance improvements using Riverbed’s solutions. The decision would enable us to delay a move to a new 2 Mbps connection by at least a year so that the Riverbed deployment would effectively pay for itself by our reduced bandwidth bills.”
Gardner Stewart Architects was approached by Teneo who offered a two-week trial of Riverbed Steelhead Appliances. In this time it discovered it was able to achieve significant performance gains.
Davis again:
“Teneo was able to help us improve file sharing speeds between our offices very significantly such that a large file that had taken 45 minutes to copy across to the Birmingham office took a few seconds. With Riverbed Steelhead Appliances deployed, employees were able to quickly download shared files, upload changes and collaborate effectively.”
James Hall, head of marketing and operations, Teneo Limited, summed up:
“Gardner Stewart Architects has gained significant cost and productivity advantage by opting for the Riverbed solution. Our bandwidth optimisation figures show that the firm was able to achieve a five fold capacity increase when sending files from its LAN to its WAN. Peak data reduction was 100 per cent meaning that bandwidth consumption during these file movements has fallen dramatically. It all proves that simply reaching for the company cheque book to buy more bandwidth is not the answer for most companies who are experiencing application performance issues at the desktop.”
