Who are Finlays?

Finlays Horticulture specialise in growing, processing, packaging, marketing and distributing cut flowers and premium prepared fresh vegetables. Supplying most of the UK’s retailers, Finlays has a longstanding tradition of continually expanding by seeking new opportunities to benefit shareholders, employees and stakeholders. Its most recent expansion was into fresh produce and rubber.

Snapshot:

The performance of applications across the WAN is critical to, which relies heavily on real-time applications. One of the challenges Finlays had was that their business performance was negatively affected due to poor application performance.

Challenges: 

Finlays rely heavily on real-time applications and have most of their IT systems centralized.  The huge increase in traffic across the WAN meant that poor application performance was affecting business performance.

• Productivity drop
• Lost revenue

Solution: 

Finlays had previously deployed a WAN optimisation solution, but it simply didn’t provide the benefits or increased services levels that had been promised. After working with Finlays to understand bandwidth, performance and critical nature of applications, Cisilion proposed a solution from Riverbed and  worked with Finlays on a SteelHead proof of concept (POC) at a couple of their remote sites.

Cisilion designed and scoped the solution, which consisted of Riverbed SteelHead CX 1550 series appliances. Within just 30 days, the results were enough to convince the management team to roll out Riverbed to all its national sites.

Benefits & numbers: 

• 60% reduction in WAN bandwidth
• Improved employee productivity
• Improved collaboration between offices due to improved download times, increased application speeds and workflow efficiency
• Better visibility into application and network performance
• Reduction in daily data replication from 24hrs to just under 4