Johannesburg, 23 Jul 2000
The Players
Nestl'e is the world`s largest food company. Nestl'e products are available in nearly every country around the world. Its household name brands have a high visibility in the food market in South Africa and are well respected.
USKO is an IT company which delivers E-business solutions and services to medium and large enterprises. With a team of more than 800 IT specialists across southern Africa, and operating out of 13 sites from Cape Town to Mauritius, USKO offers its clients and partners competitive advantage through partnerships and joint ventures. Listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, key USKO shareholders include the Altron Group and USKO staff. Altron has management control of USKO.
The Challenge
Nestl'e South Africa planned to centralise its local operation on existing and new IBM AS/400s and roll out Microsoft Exchange to all users. The increase in traffic as a result of the centralisation of AS/400s would undoubtedly result in a congested network and heavily utilised bandwidth. USKO, working closely with Telkom and Nestl'e, was appointed to design a fault-tolerant and redundant network.
The Response
As a precursor to multiprotocol network centralisation, USKO designed and implemented a fault tolerant and redundant network upgrade across the company. This upgrade to the Nestl'e wide area network (WAN) was implemented at the Randburg head office and 25 other sites. The project was part of a Nestl'e initiative to introduce the BPCS enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to its Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) zone, under which Nestl'e South Africa falls.
USKO undertook a sub-project to link all smaller Nestl'e regional offices to the head office through a virtual private network (VPN). Here, the lower rental costs associated with the VPN option far outweighed the costly hardware infrastructure outlay required to connect these branches to the network. This included the use of triangulation and ISDN back-up to ensure the maximum amount of uptime. At the same time, the bandwidth from busy regional offices to Nestl'e Randburg was increased from 64k to 128k diginet lines in order to accommodate the increased network traffic created by the Microsoft Exchange roll-out.
USKO`s overall services included network design, integration, maintenance and support
The Technology
Nestl'e uses voice over IP (VOIP) technology, a cost saver on internal communication. This Cisco software technology ensures stable voice connectivity. In addition SNA traffic is localised to a centralised network allowing mainframes through other protocols like IP. USKO installed the first 3660 Cisco router onto Nestl'e`s backbone for the purpose of integrating VOIP and ISDN. USKO`s Network Managed Systems (NMS) proactively tracks and corrects faults, aiding in capacity planning and trend analysis for the future
"USKO is a silver status Cisco partner"
"As the world`s largest food company with an annual turnover of some US$400-billion, Nestl'e`s business is mission critical"
"As the incumbent network supplier and manager of the Nestl'e network, USKO is ideally equipped to deliver a solution tailored to our exacting needs. We are also looking to expand out strategic partnership to the point where we share our network challenges with USKO and hear how they can add value to the Nestl'e business through IT solutions," John Griffiths, Nestl'e.
Share