Allan Gray Limited, the largest privately owned investment management firm in SA, has outsourced its wide area network requirements to MTN Network Solutions. The deal, which allowed Allan Gray an opportunity to outsource its non-core business components to a well-established provider, was concluded recently when the last part of the VPN installation took place.
Edgar Laxton, IT Director of Allan Gray, says: "Even though our core focus is not running a wide area network, it is a key part of our business without which we would not be able to operate or deliver services to our clients. MTN Network Solutions not only provide us with a branch network, but they also provide other crucial services such as access to the Internet, and through their Johnnic Group association, access to live financial feeds from I-Net Bridge.
"This service allowed us to consolidate multiple services, access circuits and infrastructures into one provider, over a single circuit. This not only saved us costs, but also significantly improved our Network`s redundancy, reliability and fault tolerance. It has greatly simplified our network and allowed us to benefit from the economies of scale provided by MTN NS."
MTN Network Solutions and sister company I-Net have joined forces to create a product bundle of data services. Historically, financial institutions have had three networks run by three providers - Internet access, I-Net Bridge for data feeds, and their own private network (or VPN) to interconnect their branches. Each network had a specific Telkom lines, a separate router and associated IP addressing and security issues. I-Net and MTN NS saw this opportunity to bundle all three services into a single access circuit in a single IP routing domain, securely firewalled off from any external networks. This is made possible by MTN NS`s underlying MPLS enabled high availability core national network.
Angus Macintosh, IT Director at I-Net, says: "Financial services` networks have to meet very high reliability standards, and the newly deployed MTN NS network has all the redundancy, belts and braces needed to meet our requirements. The traffic prioritising, which can be provided by their MPLS core, means that the real-time feeds get right of way over less time important traffic like e-mail. This allows us to mix multiple applications and their associated data streams into a single pipe. Quality of service is in fact better than that achieved over three separate thin pipes, so it`s a winner on every front. The future is even more exciting as with MTN`s GPRS and other mobile data products, we can extend the corporate VPN to the mobile financial worker."
Says Stuart Hardy, MTN NS Sales and Marketing Director: "Allan Gray`s network requirement was a perfect fit for the unique network and services package which we provided. This is a model that can be applied to all financial institutions that currently take data feeds off the I-Net network. This aggregation of multiple services down a single managed pipe has already been extended to include mobile data services like HSCSD and GPRS from our big brother MTN SA. This unique aggregation offering is so effective and the saving so significant that we expect many of I-Net`s clients to rethink their WAN strategies."
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