Success Story

BoostEdge accelerates statutory financial reporting and consolidation at Group Alcatel

Description of the business

Group Alcatel, a global enterprise, creates solutions and telecommunications equipment for businesses, the transportation industry, energy, defense, and public sectors, service providers and the general public. It is a worldwide leader in IP and optical networks, enterprise mobile and IP telephony, and satellite technology. In market position, Alcatel is number 1 in Europe, India, Africa and the Middle East; number 3 in China; and among the leaders in North America. Alcatel employs more than 56,000 in more than 130 countries.

The challenge

Alcatel purchased the Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) software package in March 2004 in order to modernize its financial reporting solution on a fully web-enabled basis. An equally important driver was the need to fully comply with the consolidation standards of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). During the initial rollout in September 2004 of nearly 150 remote users, certain response time problems were encountered, particulary at business units with low WAN bandwidth. Alcatel then resized its HFM platform and modified its scripts to improve response time.

But at the first deadline for 2005 provisional reporting, activity spikes generated response time degradation. "Users must access the HFM application several times at the beginning of each month. The provisional reporting deadline incorporates as many as 16 scenarios and hundreds of indicators that account for the heaviest load of our monthly deadlines. We experience very high activity during the hours immediately preceding the deadline," explains Mr. Francois Johannel, Reporting and Consolidation Systems Manager. Since reporting is at the core of system analysis, decision making and running the enterprise, timely consolidation is a fundamental issue. Mr. Johannel and the entire IT network team at Alcatel had to quickly find an effective solution to this problem.

The solution

"We therefore sought a permanent web acceleration solution to lessen the burden on the network that would not require a box at every remote site," explained Mr. Johannel. The first tests with BoostEdge were conducted in a simulation environment in order to confirm ActivNetworks' claims. In less than a month, Alcatel decided to deploy BoostEdge in production based on the following simulation findings: "The acceleration appliance is simple and quick to put into production; it simplifies our architecture under the burden of compression and encryption; it fulfills its promise of dataflow reduction. The technical team had confidence because BoostEdge is available on the IBM xSeries platform and they became quite comfortable with adding the appliance into the heart of our critical reporting and consolidation architecture," added Mr. Johannel.

Benefits

BoostEdge demonstrated its benefits in the actual environment: "What we had measured in simulation was confirmed in production. The first consolidation during the month of March 2005 proceeded very well, without a single, major technical snag. The crisis had passed; results were immediately apparent: dataflow was on average reduced by more than 45% which enabled response time to be cut in half. Once BoostEdge was installed, a number of users contacted us to express their satisfaction," noted Mr. Johannel. "BoostEdge is a product that is simple, efficient and works as promised: it took three hours to install and configure for an immediate answer to our problem. Who could ask for more"

Key benefits

Reduction in HTTP dataflow of 45%
Response time reduced by half inaverage
Users are satisfied
Installed and configured in production in three hours
Reporting is carried out on time
No additional network cost