Expand Networks Wins Drive Assist and Delivers Superior End User Experience at Branch Offices

WAN Optimization ensures workforce efficiency and operational savings; RoI of
one year beats competition
SLOUGH, UK--(Business Wire)--
Expand Networks www.expand.com, the leader in optimizing WANs for branch office
consolidation and virtualization, today announced that Drive Assist, the non
fault accident specialists, has deployed Expand Networks` WAN Optimization
technology to accelerate the delivery of its business applications and bring its
distributed workforce in virtual proximity of applications and datacentre
services. Expand`s WAN Optimization technology has improved user productivity
and business efficiency whilst delivering low TCO and contributing to
significant reduction in ICT expenditure.

Drive Assist specialize in providing replacement vehicles for innocent parties
following roadside accidents. The business has grown dramatically in recent
years and now boasts national coverage via 19 regional offices. With no remote
servers in place, users at Drive Assist`s remote offices were physically
separated from the applications and services they required to do their jobs,
relying on WAN links to access data from the head office site. With increasingly
large amounts of data travelling over the WAN, latency and congestion challenges
began to compromise business efficiency.

"Bandwidth capacity became an increasing concern," explains Simon Wilson,
network manager at Drive Assist. "As staff numbers increased so did the WAN
traffic, resulting in poor network performance. Initially we undertook a
company-wide bandwidth upgrade to overcome this. However, as the organization
continued to grow, specifically from an administration standpoint, it became
clear this was not sufficient. We generated more and more documents and with
that came more printing, causing the WAN links to become saturated very quickly
- even after the upgrade."

Drive Assist evaluated WAN Optimisation technology from Expand Networks and
Riverbed to address the problem and selected Expand Networks for its superior
Wide Area File Services (WAFS) capability and favorable business case. "Proven
business value is critical for any procurement we make and our financial
director sought a guaranteed pay back from the technology within one year,"
comments Wilson. "Whilst Riverbed`s solution offered us pay back for our
investment over a four year period, Expand could deliver a full RoI within 11
months - the choice was simple."

Expand Networks` integrated WAN Optimization approach uses techniques such as
byte-level caching and dynamic compression, delivering a superior end user
experience for Drive Assist by ensuring fast and secure access to centrally
located data across its increasingly distributed WAN. The compression
capabilities of the platform quickly delivered the bandwidth increase required
whilst the acceleration techniques overcame any latency. In addition, according
to Wilson, Expand`s integrated WAFS functionality enabled employees at the
branch offices to collaborate with shared data as though they were on the same
LAN.

"Expand has given us a very stable network environment. The performance of our
applications is significantly quicker, improving our remote users` productivity.
Monitoring tells us that usage is now so low we are set to trade the 2Mg links
that we upgraded in 2008 back down to 1Mg, which translates into yet another
significant cost saving. With Expand we are reaping the productivity benefits of
WAN Optimization at the same time as reducing the TCO and increasing the RoI on
our existing infrastructure."

The WAN Optimization technology is also supporting all VoIP calls at Drive
Assist. With all calls recorded for security reasons, VoIP traffic going back to
the main site can suffer from packet loss causing a jitter effect. Expand`s
layer 7 QoS (Quality of Service) ensures all VoIP traffic has the protected
bandwidth it needs.

Adam Davison, VP Corporate Marketing and Sales, Expand Networks, comments; "As
users and their applications move further apart, business performance suffers.
Expand`s technology delivers a virtual proximity experience designed to close
this gap through the delivery of virtual bandwidth. Drive Assist is a great
example of how our next generation compression and caching techniques can take
limited Wide Area Links and create 4 to 10 times the throughputs - on the exact
same infrastructure. In today`s economic conditions, sweating your assets in
this way is critical and as Drive Assist shows, our technology can increases
business productivity whilst delivering extended returns on network investments
by stretching limited resources further."

Cohesive Communications - EMEA
Jennifer Manning
+44 (0) 1291 626200
expand@cohesive.uk.com

Copyright Business Wire 2009