Shaklee spent $1 million on the network equipment upgrade, which was completed in March 2006.

Meanwhile in December 2005, Shaklee upgraded the remote-access system for its 500 employees, and again chose Virtela, which had bid against Fiberlink and iPass.

When it came time to hire a company to provide end-to-end management of its LAN and WAN devices, Shaklee asked Virtela to submit a bid. "We were so impressed with their ability to win our business on the WAN procurement and the quality of service we had received in the last six months, that we went out with a no-bid deal," Fina says.

In July, Shaklee rolled all of its business with Virtela into a single four-year, seven-figure contract. "This is the first company that I've ever dealt with that is a one-stop shop. . . . With Virtela, if I have a problem, I call one number," Fina says, pointing out that Shaklee's global account representative handles problems, as well as requests for additional services.

"Also, the install engineers that started with the WAN project have stayed on through phase three of our project," Fina says. "It's that same group of engineers that do all the work, so they have almost as much understanding of the network as we do. It's very reassuring," he says.

Analyst Passmore says it's not surprising that Virtela won Shaklee's global network business. "If you're trying to provide site-to-site connectivity across multiple carrier boundaries, the carriers are not anxious to peer with each other for services like MPLS, so really the only place you can go to is a VNO like Virtela or Vanco," Passmore says. "Companies like having [service-level agreements] that span multiple service provider clouds," he says.

So far, Virtela has taken over network management in Shaklee's three U.S. sites. "I don't know the exact figures for the return on this investment, but we will be able to open new markets sooner than we anticipated because of Virtela's global reach," Fina says.

Shaklee has a rigorous SLA with Virtela that includes delivery of service anywhere in the world within 60 days. In addition, Virtela has to notify Shaklee of an equipment failure within 15 minutes.

"We've had stuff that hasn't gone perfectly well," Fina admits. "When there's a problem, we escalate it to their technical staff and they solve the problem."

Next, Virtela will take over managing Shaklee's firewalls and network security devices as part of its outsourcing deal.

In December, Shaklee is opening operations in Taiwan that Virtela supports. "We were able to open up Taiwan one month sooner than anticipated because of Virtela," Allen says. "They set up the circuits in five weeks instead of six weeks," he says.

Thanks to the network upgrades, Shaklee's IT staff can support whatever growth the company's management team wants. "Two years ago, from an infrastructure perspective, we couldn't have executed on this business strategy," Fina says. "Now we have agreements in place with all of our vendors to deliver services into whatever country we want to go."