Expand Networks, one of the leaders in optimizing WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualization, together with one of Africa’s largest Telecommunications provider, Telkom SA, have been jointly honoured at the recent 2011 Global Telecoms Business Innovation Awards.
The winners were announced during a gala dinner at the Park Lane Hotel in London. Both corporate companies have won the prestigious accolade for Wide Area Network Optimization.
Expand Networks has won the Global Telecoms Business award for the second consecutive year. In 2010 the company won an award for its Satellite Service Innovation.
Telkom and Expand Networks’ winning project successfully deployed a managed WAN optimization service for retail giant SPAR Group, improving performance levels, reducing latency and easing congestion of satellite links that had compromised the efficiency of SPAR’s applications and services.
The collaboration on the SPAR project beat off hundreds of nominations for the industry’s most innovative projects that were received from the readers of Global Telecoms Business in 2011.
“Fast and resilient communications across SPAR’s supply chain is critical to ensuring high levels of service and convenience are delivered to customers. To optimize the bandwidth between SPAR’s headquarters, distribution centres and 900 stores in South Africa, we developed a managed optimisation service with Telkom to mitigate WAN latency and congestion over satellite links.
“Results were immediate; a number of the group’s top retailers quickly gave very positive responses to the solution as user experience improved dramatically,” Elie Barr, CEO of Expand Networks.
“Expand Networks provided a good solution to the problem due to its telco-class performance, ease of management and configuration, as well as its cost and ability to scale.” Mel Lachenicht, Executive, Telkom Business Solutions, Telkom SA.
“We are all delighted to receive this award which demonstrates the value and transformational qualities of network optimisation.”
“The award also chimes with our own continued commitment in working closely with our global telco partners in helping to better manage the flow of traffic and optimize communications offerings to organizations across the globe,” says Barr.
“This is the fifth time we’ve run the Global Telecoms Business Innovation Awards and this year we saw more nominations, from a greater range of operators and vendors, than ever before. We started the Awards in order to celebrate what the industry is doing, making a huge difference to the world, to all of us in business and as consumers.
“Congratulations to all of this year’s award winners and to Expand and Telkom for the Wide Area Network Innovation award,” Alan Burkitt-Gray, Global Telecoms Business Editor.
By: Staff Writer
