Teneo helps SGS deliver optimised performance of global web application

Published on: 01 July 2004

Solution delivers 300% improvement in response time and 600% reduction in bandwidth utilisation

Teneo, the specialist provider of application performance management solutions has announced Swiss based SGS as a new customer of its Velocity appliance from FineGround networks. The solution has enabled SGS to deliver its web based Tradeworks application to users in countries as diverse as Madagascar and Venezuela.

SGS is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland and is the global leader in the inspection, verification, testing and certification industry. The Tradeworks application will ultimately be rolled out to 100 countries and is used by SGS' TAS division. TAS inspects and reviews the quantity, quality and price of goods to facilitate the correct assessment of import duties and taxes and ensure that such goods comply with relevant laws and customs regulations. Being web based keeps local application support costs to a minimum, but offers up challenges in terms of usability and performance.

"We required a transparent, centrally managed solution that would deliver high-performance applications to 36,000 employees in over 120 countries," said Trevor Whiteman at SGS. "By working closely with FineGround's European partner Teneo we were able to monitor actual end-user response times and implement automated application optimisation. This allowed us to deliver an average of 70% improvement in application response time and a 92% reduction in bandwidth utilisation in the first phase of the implementation. The FineGround Velocity appliance enables us to maximise business process performance with minimum infrastructure investment."

The FineGround Velocity appliance was designed for easy deployment and to operate transparently with both the network and its applications. Rather than throwing more server infrastructure and bandwidth resource at slow performing applications, FineGround offers a centralised, cost-effective appliance offering.

Located at the data centre, the FineGround Velocity appliance delivers accelerated performance to all of SGS' Tradeworks users, combining the advantages of centralised management with end-to-end optimisation of server and network resources.

Velocity integrates a suite of optimisations to deliver application performance, eliminating redundancies between successive downloads of the same or similar pages by only sending the changes in the data.

SGS's initial challenge was that the application was being delivered to areas with traditionally poor infrastructure such as Africa, Asia and South America. Offices are regularly disrupted due to local political problems and the Madagascar office offered a particular challenge in that there are no landlines available to the outside world, all communications are by Satellite. Where bandwidth costs are high, the ability to deliver an application over a low bandwidth connection and still make response times acceptable is critical.

"We quickly realized that, as our application has an average page size of 30k and with response times of 17 or 18 seconds, we risked failure of the project", continued Trevor Whiteman. "We investigated potential solutions and FineGround was adopted because it made the application instantly available everywhere, with no need for local installations. It also provided comprehensive monitoring tools, required no changes in the application and lead to dramatic reduction in page sizes and response times."

Teneo worked closely with the SGS project team during the trial stage, tuning the FineGround solution to offer the greatest performance benefits. After the comprehensive trials, FineGround is now in place, delivering Tradeworks to a pilot of 12 sites, with testing being run from Switzerland and the live deployment at Colt Telecom in London, SGS's service provider. Improvements have been seen across the board, with page sizes being reduced by up to 600% a reduction from an average of 30k down to 5k and access times reduced from 17 seconds down to 5 seconds. In Madagascar, 10 users can now operate, where previously 1 user would struggle. The application can be used effectively where 64k is the upper limit for bandwidth and FineGround's reporting functionality enables SGS to identify both high dynamic page sizes and processor intensive queries.

Piers Carey, CEO of Teneo commented "We are seeing more and more web enabled applications being deployed by our customers and users need fast and consistent response times from their applications. By deploying FineGround at SGS we have reduced the consumption of bandwidth and improved the response time for their Tradeworks application. This enables them to deliver better performing applications at lower cost."

"There is no doubt", concluded Trevor Whiteman "that without FineGround, we risked failure with the roll out of the project. With FineGround we have made it a massive success"

For further information please contact media@teneo.co.uk