Pilkington Group
Pilkington is one of the world's largest manufacturers of glass and glazing products for building, automotive and technical markets.
Environment:
- 11,000 email users
- 40% of employees mobile.
- Increased traffic & large attachments.
- Exchange 5.5 migrating to Exchange 2003
- Outlook 98, XP, 2000, 2003
With over 11,000 email users, 40% working on a mobile basis and projects running across departments and countries, the pressure to provide an efficient email service was telling on Pilkington’s Exchange 5.5 system.
Email performance concerns were noticeably linked to the increasing size and volume of email attachments. All business users were tending to send more frequent and larger email attachments and some departments, such as engineering and others with collaborative projects were seen as particular culprits. A manual ‘zipping’ utility was available to email users, but as Russ Norton, Operations Service Support Manager Europe, notes, “people just didn’t make the effort to use it” – a frequent problem.
In mid-2004, Pilkington recognized that enforcing and automating the ‘zipping’ process could help both in the lead-up to a migration to Exchange 2003 and on an ongoing basis, and evaluated C2C’s MaX Compression.
Pilkington selected MaX Compression for its pedigree of scalability and invisibility to users, and scheduled a world-wide roll-out across 11,000 mailboxes. The decision was justified when the Exchange Information Stores showed an average reduction of size of around 30% across the board, with the major ‘culprit’ departments significantly higher.
Since implementation, improved performance has been especially evident for the older servers, while the extended life of server hardware has had the bonus of “cost avoidance” for the IT team.
A major profile of employees has also benefited: the large and growing group of laptop users. “These remote users have really gained evident benefits from MaX Compression, where bandwidth restrictions used to make their email slow and frustrating”, says Norton.
With the migration to Exchange 2003 well underway, the resulting increased efficiency of email has become even more pronounced with the addition of MaX Compression. Norton says, “Migrating to 2003 alone has brought us incredible benefits, but MaX Compression has made some clear differences and added real value on top of Exchange 2003”.
As Russ Norton summarizes: “MaX Compression is proven to be of enormous benefit to all our Outlook users, whether they’re office-based or on a laptop. The invisibility of MaX Compression is its attraction – everyone gains the benefits of zipping with no effort!”