Lagan Construction Uses Riverbed To Solve Location Offices Connectivity

Published 1st June 2006

Dublin, Ireland, Thursday, 1 June 2006.
Lagan Construction, part of the Belfast-headquartered Lagan group of companies, has piloted Riverbed's Steelhead appliances in a number of its construction offices and now intends to standardise on the award winning WAN optimisation technology. The Steelhead appliance allows Lagan to connect its site offices into its corporate network creating a Local Area Network (LAN) performance over a Wide Area Network (WAN).

4sol is the exclusive reseller for Riverbed's Steelhead appliances in Ireland and Northern Ireland. John Lennon, managing director of 4sol recommended the use of Steelhead to solve Lagan's connectivity issues of their remote offices.

"We had just finished helping Lagan migrate Windows Exchange 5.5 and Windows NT to 2003 and were in the process of installing Microsoft Sharepoint across the company when we discovered the issues of setting up and managing the company's construction offices. Each new location
required a new server to be commissioned and connectivity issues were a problem. The decision to employ the Microsoft Sharepoint services made sense from a strategic viewpoint but it, and other Microsoft applications, did not operate at optimal speeds over the WAN," says Lennon.

"This issue is compounded when one looks at the Lagan business modelwhich operates through a network of offices and temporary site locations across the world. The company requires all site locations to be IT enabled quickly, with a minimal need for local specialist expertise and
the site infrastructure to be managed from head office in Belfast.

"Riverbed was the obvious solution," says Lennon. He and his team installed two Riverbed Steelhead devices. One was located in the Belfast head office, the other in Tyrone. Immediately, Lagan witnessed impressive results and started rolling out the devices to other sites including Puerto Rico in the Caribbean.

The enhanced performance of applications over its WAN has enabled Lagan to use Microsoft's Sharepoint enterprise content management system across its business. This allows Lagan to effectively manage unstructured content such as drawings, photographs, documents and project plans, through the entire project lifecycle - creation, management, storage, and disposal.

By successfully accelerating Sharepoint, Riverbed Steelhead appliances have made it possible for project managers to log in from any steelhead-enabled site in the world to review work on any site, helping to improve collaboration and tighten management control.

Installing Steelhead appliances also enabled Lagan to free up bandwidth for VOIP telephone calls, resulting in significant savings in its budget for international calls.

Jim Fennell, IS manager for Lagan is very pleased with the results. "When we first trialled Steelhead, it took just ten minutes to set up and we could immediately see the difference.

"The main benefit of using Steelhead is that it connects to a central data store which removes the need to install servers at remote sites, thereby reducing administration and maintenance costs, enabling all users to share common data and allowing managers immediate access to
information held at remote locations.

"All in all, 4sol and Steelhead have removed many of the headaches of maintaining and supporting Lagan Construction IT facilities across the world. As a result, we expect to make substantial savings in outsourced IT support," he concludes.





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