Ferm is a wholesale business that imports and distributes equipment for the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) market and the semi-professional market. The products include tools for home improvement and garden and car maintenance, such as jigsaws, polishing and sanding machines, compressors, battery chargers and lawn mowers. Every year about 2,500 containers, each containing thousands of Ferm’s products, find their way to hardware stores, home improvement centers and supermarkets all over the world. Ferm, established in 1965, is headquartered in Zwolle in the Netherlands and has subsidiaries in Shanghai, China and Denzlingen, Germany. Ferm has about 120 employees.

The Challenge: Enable the Best Performance of Business-critical Data from China

Ferm was one of the first importers of Do-It-Yourself tools and established a subsidiary in China more than 15 years ago. Thanks to the Chinese organization, Ferm is able to supply tools of very good quality at the right price. The Dutch and Chinese organizations have intensive, daily contact and anticipate the demands of the international market for high-quality products at a reasonable price. However, until 2006, Ferm had no dedicated online connection with Shanghai.

“We installed a public Internet VPN between Zwolle and Shanghai to be able to exchange digital information in a secure way,” said Bart de Boer, IT manager. “But our 512 Kb connection was quickly saturated with the synchronization of many large files and was not able to handle growth in data traffic. Upgrading was not an option, however. Communication in China is at least five times more expensive than in most other countries in the world. So we started looking for a smarter solution.”

Implementing a Citrix Application Delivery Infrastructure Solution

Ferm was already looking for WAN acceleration products but was skeptical about this technology and its price in general. Compello, a Gold Citrix® Solution Advisor, offered a try-and-buy project for the Citrix WANScaler™ solution, which won Ferm over for a trial without risks. “We experienced first-hand how easy it is to install Citrix WANScaler. The WANScaler appliances discover each other and configuration was not necessary. In addition, the WANScaler solution was reasonably priced compared to other solutions, so we decided to go for Citrix. The complete project of installing, testing, buying and final rollout took less than two days,” continued de Boer.

Ferm also found the administration of the WANScaler devices very easy. For example, fine-tuning the devices to reserve bandwidth for Microsoft® Remote Desktop Protocol used for system administration was done from the intuitive WANScaler Web interface. Ferm can also upgrade the firmware of the appliances, including the one in Shanghai, from headquarters simply by using a Web browser.

With WANScaler in the Ferm network, employees in China have a better end-user experience with Microsoft® Navision and Outlook® than the WAN connection itself could ever provide.

Access Files from China with LAN-like Performance

Ferm is now able to work more efficiently as all communication has been accelerated. The Navision ERP solution can now be used from China, and all purchasing orders and invoices are synchronized using the WANScaler devices. “As we move more and more work to China, fast data exchange is important. Artwork for products created in the Netherlands must be available in the Far East, and these files are extremely large. Synchronizing these graphical files is no longer a problem using the Citrix solution,” continued de Boer. “The other way around, employees in the Netherlands now access technical specifications from China online.”

A new experience for Ferm after installing Citrix WANScaler is that employees in China are able to consult files such as technical specifications themselves, at a time when it is convenient and efficient for them. “WANScaler changed our data retrieval process in China from a push to a pull mechanism,” said de Boer. Fast access to file servers containing these files is made possible by using the CIFS protocol caching mechanism in the WANScaler appliances.

“We are impressed with these features,” he added. “We experience LAN-like access times to file servers in China and the Netherlands. The access is so fast that it appears that the servers are on the same LAN. We know that the WANScaler appliances really do their job. Looking at the statistics of the devices, we saw that the communication demand had been 200GB in a two-month timeframe. However, after using WANScaler to optimize, prioritize and compress data, the actual volume of data sent over the line was 20GB. Therefore, we had 90 percent less data load on the connection. The beauty of WANScaler is that this all happens invisibly, in the background.”

Achieve Cost Savings and Faster Time to Market

Instead of upgrading the very expensive connections to China and increasing monthly costs, Ferm made a one-time investment in the WANScaler solution, which now takes care of optimizing and accelerating the slow connection. “The return on investment is less than five months. After that period, the costs are the same as the original Internet VPN. You could say that we continue to save money, month after month, by avoiding the WAN upgrade, which is a good thing in our competitive market,” concluded de Boer. “In addition, our time to market has improved because we can anticipate customer wishes and outsource work much faster. Ferm is able to guarantee delivery of our tools with very good quality at the right price.”

©2008 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Citrix® and Citrix WANScaler™ are trademarks or registered trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Microsoft®, Windows®, Windows Server® and Outlook® are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.