Networking: Case studies

When Chad Clement joined worldwide office furniture maker Haworth 18 months ago, he discovered the company needed to get a handle on network security.

Glen Dalgleish, vice president of infrastructure services at global perfumer Coty, well remembers why he and his staff had implemented WAN acceleration technology last January: to improve download speeds for some 6,000 users world-wide.

BI projects are frequently driven by the demands of executives who want to scour dashboards to analyze sales and other business trends. But at Boyne Resorts, the company's BI directive was marshaled by its CIO.

When TV production company FremantleMedia Australia had an opportunity to move to IP telephony during an office refurbishment, the open source Asterisk proved itself to offer everything required and more for the 150-plus handset deployment.

Gibson Guitar is enjoying the sweet music playing out on its multifaceted unified communications system that connects its users across the globe.

West Virginia-based WesBanco Bank, which provides financial services to the residents and businesses of West Virginia, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania, grows through acquisition.

The US$1.5 billion Venetian resort in Las Vegas is a city within a city.

City West Water has reduced maintenance costs, eliminated paper based reporting and increased responsiveness with an integrated job management system and a new fleet of Next G handsets.

Employment and training firm CVGT has installed a network management toolkit to enforce compliance and protect the financial and personal data of its 40,000-plus apprentices and trainees.

Gold Coast City Council has cut the complexity from network management by dumping its unsupported Novell network authentication software for a new solution.

Highly distributed organsations run their IT systems on a managed services provider (MSP) model -- supporting numbers of offices dispersed over a geographic area. Mark Scott, president of The Utility Company, says the best model for this combines advanced network monitoring with a franchising system, such as that used by Dunkin' Donuts. His company is an MSP serving a growing population of small companies -- "five-person PR firms, 30-person law offices" -- across North America from its Ottawa, Canada, base.