BACKGROUND
Provident Management Services is a part of Provident Financial; one of the biggest personal finance companies in the UK with over 250 branches nationwide.
The company has a strong IT presence with over 100 members of staff company-wide associated with IT.
Provident have an extensive mobile sales force and supporting managers who remotely access web based services, applications and data. Provident worked with SICL to establish how remote access could be accelerated on 3G and Broadband to increase speed, service and application performance to remote workers.
SOLUTION
Following analysis and testing, the Riverbed Mobile Client solution was proven to be the most appropriate for the requirement and provided significant performance uplift on remote access.
Riverbed Steelhead devices, supporting 20Mb and 4,000 TCP sessions were deployed at the Bradford Head Office having been capacity-planned for the number of concurrent TCP sessions required.
A Riverbed Mobile Controller was also deployed and scaled to support the anticipated growth of mobile users. This was one of the largest Riverbed Mobile deployments in the UK, and has subsequently been increased by several hundred additional users.
RESULT
Improved reliability and speed on remote access has resulted in greater user confidence in the network and increased productivity.
“SICL demonstrated great flexibility and worked with Provident to test and deploy the Riverbed Mobile solution allowing Provident to add additional users later.”
Dave Hopkins
IT Project Manager
Provident Financial Management Services