Network traffic at ICI’s global paints, adhesives and specialty products business spans some 400 locations in 46 countries. Yet the company had little or no idea of what application traffic was traversing this network, who was generating it or how much bandwidth it was consuming.

About 275 ICI offices are attached to a single global multi-protocol label switched (MPLS) backbone, with 60 more attached to regional MPLS connections and 40 using country-specific leased lines. Inevitably, such a large network was costly to run and was constantly eating up more bandwidth upgrades, says Hitesh Parmar, ICI’s global network technology manager.

‘Every year bandwidth demands have increased by 80 to 100 per cent, with most of the traffic growth coming from China, India and South America, where the cost of network capacity is very expensive. At the same time, the chief information officer’s focus is to save on network costs,’ says Parmar.

After evaluating various network management solutions, ICI decided to introduce NetQoS Performance Center’s
ReporterAnalyzer module.

‘Many products provided great use reporting, but when we asked the suppliers to give us something that allowed us to actually view the data, nobody came up with anything. We eventually got down to just NetQoS and an Irish company. We went with NetQoS because the licensing costs were much cheaper,’ says Parmar.

ReporterAnalyzer gave ICI the traffic visibility it needed to make more informed bandwidth procurement decisions, and reported where capacity was being underused.

‘We were finding that 60 per cent of traffic was email and 20 per cent web browsing. Less than 20 per cent was mission-critical,’ says Parmar.

ICI has built a classification system that makes sure mission-critical traffic is served by a full MPLS network with round-the-clock management and end-to-end service level guarantees. Web browsing and email are routed via cheaper DSL links through a public internet VPN with no SLAs.

‘We have a three-year budget and do not expect to increase capacity on the data network in those three years. Before our costs were increasing by 20 to 30 per cent every year just on bandwidth upgrades,’ says Parmar. ‘We also have more bandwidth to automate processes that were paper-driven, such as paint usage distribution channels.’