Jaakko P"oyry is a Finnish firm of engineering and project management consultants. Its South African office is based in KwaZulu-Natal.
The company, which focuses on the pulp and paper industry, relies heavily on IT in the course of its business activities.
A move to new office premises in Westville (Durban) was the motivator for an upgrade to its 80-user corporate network, which runs a number of applications including Oracle database, specialist CAD/CAM systems and other proprietary solutions.
According to Brett Boswell, systems manager at Jaakko P"oyry, an upturn in the pulp and paper engineering market in SA - which is rapidly recovering from a 2000 slump - has placed additional pressure on the company`s computer systems from capacity and performance perspectives.
"In addition, we introduced 3D CAD design software, which is at the cutting-edge of this technology, but is capacity-intensive," he says.
"As a consequence, we approached 3Com SA, through its KwaZulu-Natal branch, to assist us with the design and implementation of a network upgrade."
Donovan Maidens, network manager at Jaakko P"oyry, explains: "Essentially, we installed a much faster 1Gbps backbone, with faster (10/100Gbps) links to our users. 3Com switches and technology were installed exclusively."
The upgrade has been of particular benefit to Jaakko P"oyry`s high-end users in the administration and CAD/CAM departments where pre-programmed backups occur every two hours.
"Previously these operations were time-consuming and not without glitches. Since the upgrade backups are no longer the headache they were," says Maidens.
Jaakko P"oyry has plans in place for further upgrades, aimed at its capacity-intensive CAD/CAM department.
"We will probably extend the high speed, 1Gb infrastructure out to the edge of the network in this area to give our designers` workstations even more of a performance boost," he notes.
In addition, intelligence functionality within the 3Com "layer four" network switches will be employed to introduce prioritisation over the network to allow business critical traffic - such as e-mail - to gain a degree of advantage.
"Our emphasis on IT comes at a time when our sales efforts in both local and foreign markets are bearing fruit," adds Maidens. "We believe that to sustain our success and maintain our advantage in this arena, our core technology must be up-to-date."
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