CUPERTINO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Packeteer® (NASDAQ:PKTR), the global leader in WAN Application Optimization, today announced that fast-growing civil engineering firm AVID Group, based in Palm Harbor, FL, is deploying its iShared™ branch office IT services appliance to support an explosion of residential, commercial and public sector projects requiring collaboration between distributed, multi-disciplinary teams. The iShared solution eliminates the need for expensive, standalone Microsoft Exchange e-mail servers and tape drive backup solutions for each branch location. By establishing a common distributed file structure company-wide with the iShared systems, AVID Group is centralizing and synchronizing shared files that dramatically improve the productivity of project managers and CAD technicians. The recent real estate explosion, combined with a reputation for being a truly responsive and energetic land development consulting firm, has resulted in rapid growth for AVID Group. With 150 employees — forecast to triple in the next three years — residential, commercial and public sector specialists are distributed between headquarters in Palm Harbor and branch locations throughout Florida to provide a host of strategic services that include engineering, planning, landscape architecture, environmental services and surveying. Prior to deploying iShared systems, AVID deployed IP-Sec virtual private networks that were supporting independent file servers running backup and administrative tasks at each location. According to AVID’s IT Manager, Pete Nuffer, this approach proved to be problematic for several reasons. “Our IT staff was losing 30 to 40 percent of their work week because of the travel time involved in supporting the branch offices,” Nuffer said. “Often times, tape backups alone could consume three hours per onsite visit. But the bigger issue was the use of separate, independent file structures in each branch. Not only did we have to perform copy scripts for backups across the wide area network at times, but if data volumes got above 50 Gigabytes, backups became totally impractical since we are using business DSL connections in a couple of our remote offices.” In addition to relying on Microsoft office applications, AVID is a heavy user of CAD products. “Because CAD products are so customizable, our CAD technicians and project teams were working on collaborative files that were getting out of synch due to copying different file directories. This clogged up our email system with multi-version file transfers — some of which were hundreds of megabytes in size — and created delays in project turnaround times since various staff members would waste valuable time looking for the right version of a file,” Nuffer added. To overcome this distributed file structure problem, AVID is deploying Packeteer’s iShared systems at all of its branch office facilities. In addition to integrating wide area file services (WAFS) and WAN optimization technologies that accelerate application performance and provide bandwidth-enhancing compression to help customers avoid expensive network upgrades, these appliances utilize a unique distributed file system that features lock manager, journaling and recovery techniques. As a result, file updates made by one user will not conflict with updates made by any other user, and updated files are available to all users across the network. The distributed file system technology proved to be a critical factor in AVID’s decision to deploy iShared systems. “We surveyed all project managers and CAD technicians, asking how much time was spent per week hunting for the correct version of a file on which they needed to work,” explained Nuffer. “When you factor in the billable rates of these users, anything that cuts down on this non-productive time carries a significant return-on-investment. And in the case of the iShared systems, we’ve calculated an eight month ROI in increased productivity alone.” On top of the productivity improvements afforded by the iShared systems, AVID is also realizing significant capital equipment savings as well. “Having installed the iShared systems, we’ve done away with the need for tape drive backups and independent Exchange servers at each branch,” said Nuffer. “And because we’ve successfully centralized and synchronized our Microsoft Office applications and AutoDesk files between all locations, we’ve dramatically cut down on our IT resource commitments at each branch to free up our time for other strategic IT issues. In the long run, this is going to help us keep pace with the incredible growth projected for the company.” According to Nuffer, AVID Group evaluated several “WAN Optimization” technologies: “We found most competitive offerings focused on streamlining the chattiness of TCP/IP and application acceleration. The iShared systems held their own on this front. But because of the tremendous amount of collaboration we do here at AVID, file consistency and centralization were our biggest keys. And this is where the iShared systems came out way ahead.”
