Success Story

Alcan's remote users benefit from the richness of the Hyperion HFM application thanks to BoostEdge

Description of the business

The worldwide leader in the aluminum and packaging industries, Alcan is also a principal global producer of plants and parts that add value to the automobile, aeronautic and bottling markets. In 2003-4, the company began to make strategic investments to broaden its presence in the world. Alcan is number one in the world in the packaging of food, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics; second worldwide in tobacco packaging. Alcan is multinational, with revenues of $25.7 billion in 2003, facilities in 55 countries, employing 70,000. Its decision-making centers are in Europe and North America.

The challenge

Alcan implemented a new application for financial reporting it called "Project Picasso", Pechiney Integration Consolidation Accounting SystemS Online, based on Hyperion Financial Management (HFM). Picasso was specifically intended for the packaging department in the Pechiney group, whose 30,000 people are distributed among 200 sites. It was expected that this new application was going to be used intensively from the first through the fourth days of the month by the 300 financial directors of the group. Of these, more than 200 are simultaneous users who connect for long sessions at widely disparate hours.

"Our problem is to make this application accessible to all of our global establishments and offer our users a uniformly high quality of access,"summarizes Thierry Michaud, IT Senior Manager. "The difficulty is in the huge diversity of our 200 establishments: the size and their capacity of their communication links very considerably." To manage their operations and to improve profitability, the group's financial directors manipulate large volumes of information under vary short deadlines. Application reporting over the WAN is therefore a strategic issue for the business.

"We had to find a convenient solution for a maximum number of sites and offer satisfactory response times for sites ranging from only 64 Kbits to as much as 45 Mbits," explains Thierry Michaud. "An HTTP compression solution was essential to answer this need; in our situation our pages contain a great volume of text with very few images."

Solving the Problem

Charged with implementation of the project, Thierry Michaud summarizes, "First, we singled out the BoostEdge solution from our research in the IT press. After we checked the experience of one of ActivNetworks' significant manufacturing clients, we decided to test BoostEdge to accelerate our network. After a single presentation on our network architecture, followed by a quick, successful implementation, we opted to purchase our first BoostEdge appliance. BoostEdge is a solution that seamlessly integrates into the existing environment and produces the speed we desired for our financial reporting, with security and high availability of service capabilities," concludes Mr. Michaud. "Our hoster shares our judgment: they found BoostEdge simple to use because it is perfectly transparent to our network, our servers, and applications. Due to the simplicity of its configuration process and the quality of consultation from ActivNetworks, our hoster was able to install BoostEdge without any difficulty and to make it immediately operative."

Benefits

"From the very first BoostEdge tests, we were able to observe very satisfactory data compression results - an average data volume reduction of 75%," notes Thierry Michaud. "We realized these results at once and our remote users were quick to express their satisfaction since they could now access pages in less than 10 seconds." BoostEdge allows Alcan's remote users to benefit from the richness of the Hyperion application without sacrificing the sophistication or performance of this solution. In addition to these immediate benefits, the BoostEdge solution pays for itself in less than a year and accompanies the evolution of the data center. "Following the improvement in productivity, we added a second BoostEdge appliance for redundancy. We don't use the full capacity of our BoostEdges -we like to have spare capacity for a succession of new applications," concluded Mr Michaud.

Key benefits

• ROI estimated in less than a year

• Reduction in HTTP dataflow of 75%

• - Response time for web pages is much faster (less than 10 seconds)

• - All the capacity of the BoostEdge is not exploited, that leaves a margin of progression side applications