Leo Burnett Worldwide is a specialty marketing services and advertising agency with offices in 83 countries around the world. It has built some of the most recognizable brands including McDonald’s, Disney and Heinz.
The IT staff for Leo Burnett Middle East and North Africa (MENA) operates a corporate network that supports more than 700 employees at nine sites in Beirut, Cairo, Casablanca, Dubai, Kuwait, Riyadh and Jeddah. Leo Burnett MENA employees rely heavily upon the corporate network to research information on the Internet, communicate with clients and access Web applications centralised in Paris, Dubai and Chicago.
The IT staff was challenged with sky rocketing network operating costs. The network was carrying over 400 Gigabyte of data per month and growing at a rate of more than 20% per year. Furthermore, network application response times were degrading due to network latency and congestion, particularly for remote office users.
IT managers attempted to gain a better understanding of network usage through their security and firewall provider. However, the process was tedious and the information was difficult to obtain. Furthermore, the data did not deliver a clear analysis of network utilisation.
Leo Burnett MENA then zeroed in on of Exinda’s WAN optimisation solutions. “During a trial in the Beirut office, we recognised the many benefits of classify and monitor traffic while optimising application performance,” says Bassem Aboukhater, Regional IT Director for Leo Burnett MENA
Leo Burnett, after the trail run in the Beirut office, deployed five additional Exinda 4700 appliances were placed at the remaining offices. “We have improved application response times. Employees enjoy quicker application response times. With Exinda’s policy-based WAN optimisation features, mission critical traffic was prioritised over less time sensitive traffic such as email,” says Aboukhater.
Controlled Recreational Usage of Network was another benefit for Leo Burnett. With complete network visibility, the IT staff identified non-business applications that were consuming important bandwidth. Network policy was established to allow recreational use of the network (e.g., streaming music and video) only after business hours. “Tracking network usage became effortless with granular, real-time monitoring and reporting. Exinda provided simple, auto-generated pdf reports that simplify network capacity planning. We are looking to upgrade to Exinda x800 series to add application acceleration,” says Aboukhater.