Microsoft Server Product PortfolioCustomer Solution Case Study

Global Manufacturer Boosts IT Capabilities and Performance, Reduces Costs by 70 Percent

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Manufacturing—High tech and electronics

Customer ProfileBlue Coat Systems, based in Sunnyvale, California, provides its application delivery network infrastructure to more than 15,000 customers worldwide. It has 1,400 employees.

Business SituationBlue Coat wanted to enhance and expand its infrastructure capabilities, especially in email and unified communications, but it wanted to do so while driving costs down, not up.

SolutionBlue Coat centralized and standardized its infrastructure on Microsoft technologies and is deploying them in a global wide area network optimized with its own products.

Benefits Boosts uptime by 10 percent, to 99.99

percent Reduces first-year costs by 70 percent Speeds network performance for

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 by up to 300 times

“Standardizing on Microsoft Unified Communications and infrastructure, together with our own WAN optimization technologies, is reducing costs beyond our expectations.”

Marshall Wolf, Vice President of IT, Blue Coat Systems

To drive further efficiencies in its infrastructure, Blue Coat Systems decided to centralize and standardize that infrastructure on Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft Unified Communications, supported by the Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 Enterprise operating systems. The move would enhance email and calendaring capabilities with presence, instant messaging, videoconferencing, desktop sharing, and more. Blue Coat also expanded the use of its own wide area network (WAN) optimization products to enhance performance of these technologies across a global WAN. The result of these adoptions makes employees more productive, avoids capital expenditures of U.S.$1.6 million for additional bandwidth, reduces annual operating expenses for travel and application support by up to 70 percent, and accelerates Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 network performance by up to 300 times.

SituationWhen Marshall Wolf joined Blue Coat Systems a year ago as vice president of technology, he expected to do a lot of thinking about his new company’s technology infrastructure. What he didn’t expect was that all the other employees were thinking about it, too. They wanted more from that infrastructure than they were getting.

“Ideally, you want technology to be so seamless, so transparent, that people can do their jobs without thinking about it,” says Wolf. “The situation here wasn’t ideal.”

The problems that Blue Coat employees were having with the company’s IT infrastructure weren’t hard to diagnose. Some enterprise applications were aging; some infrastructure elements—including some operating systems and directory services—had fallen out of support. Some services, such as instant messaging and document management, were either not enterprise-ready or simply unavailable. Various departments had their own systems and standards, the result of an enterprise infrastructure that had evolved in a decentralized way.

As part of this decentralized growth, Blue Coat was dealing with a variety of vendors, even for related needs. For example, web conferencing was provided by WebEx; private-branch exchange (PBX), voicemail, and voice over IP (VoIP) were provided by Avaya; audio conferencing and long-distance services were provided by AT&T. This led to redundant vendor management, help-desk, and other support processes and systems, in addition to sub-optimal integration among technologies and

services, which were costing the organization in both hard and soft costs.

Blue Coat knew that addressing these challenges would require a multipronged approach. The company made centralizing and standardizing the infrastructure an essential requirement for its solution, and it placed an emphasis on choosing the right software on which to standardize. To ensure the operational efficiencies it wanted to achieve, Blue Coat strove to reduce the number of vendors supporting the infrastructure, particularly the communications-related infrastructure.

Based in Sunnyvale, California, Blue Coat is a large, multinational organization with hundreds of servers and thousands of PCs located in offices throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Malaysia, India, Hong Kong, and Japan. This required Blue Coat to give particular thought to ensuring that performance of the new technology would be optimal across that vast infrastructure. If Blue Coat couldn’t ensure real-time interactivity among its distributed locations, then any upgrades to conferencing, instant messaging, and VoIP would be of little use. Employees expected their collaboration technologies, such as email and calendaring, to operate with at least near real-time capability.

For most other companies, the global distances of the Blue Coat network would inevitably incur some latency—the time it takes data to move across a network. However, as a leader in wide area network (WAN) optimization technologies, Blue Coat knew how to improve and manage delivery over the WAN to maximize the

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“Ideally, you want technology to be so seamless, so transparent, that people can do their jobs without thinking about it. The situation here wasn’t ideal.”

Marshall Wolf, Vice President of Technology, Blue Coat Systems

performance of bandwidth-intensive applications. That put Blue Coat in a position to deploy a global communications network with both low latency and cost.

SolutionBlue Coat had an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft, which it used to access a range of applications but hadn’t exploited to adopt the latest versions of Microsoft technologies. The company decided to take full advantage of its Enterprise Agreement to centralize and standardize on Microsoft technologies—especially for server and desktop infrastructure and unified communications. This would cost-effectively address a range of concerns.

Wolf expected that this decision would help minimize the expense and effort of dealing with multiple providers, eliminate overlap and duplication of effort, and lead to lower total costs for software licensing. It would also provide a software application platform both broad and deep, one that would support a comprehensive range of interoperable technologies and make giant strides toward meeting employee expectations for the infrastructure.

“We knew what our employees wanted from IT because we’d asked them, and just standardizing on Microsoft would immediately meet most of their list—and it was a pretty extensive list,” says Wolf.

Pairing Microsoft with Blue Coat But Microsoft didn’t offer all the technology that Blue Coat needed to make extensive use of bandwidth-intensive applications across a global network. To do so effectively—and cost-effectively—Blue

Coat needed to optimize its network performance. Blue Coat decided to extend the use of its own network optimization technology use to cover the new and expanded applications. With Blue Coat network technology, company executives were confident they could optimize the delivery of the new, business-critical applications while making the most of their existing network investments. Two key Blue Coat products became part of the company’s new technology plan: the Blue Coat ProxySG 9000 and PacketShaper 12000 appliances. ProxySG is an intelligent caching appliance that fulfills local data requests, when possible, without creating WAN traffic. When data does need to traverse the WAN, the appliance uses MACH5 technology to compress and optimize it, based on more than 100 communications and other protocols that Blue Coat has licensed from Microsoft. The data is streamed to reduce latency. Meanwhile, PacketShaper measures network application performance, categorizes and manages web traffic, and guarantees quality of service for preferred applications and content.

Selling the VisionNot everyone at Blue Coat was familiar with the Microsoft software, so Blue Coat introduced employees to the products at the company’s annual sales conference. A week before the conference, Wolf decided to give the sales team a hands-on demonstration of the instant messaging capability in Microsoft Lync Server 2010.

He shared his idea with consultants at Convergent Computing, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network with multiple Gold competencies and broad experience

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“We knew what our employees wanted from IT because we’d asked them, and just standardizing on Microsoft would immediately meet most of their list—and it was a pretty extensive list.”

Marshall Wolf, Vice President of Technology, Blue Coat Systems

in deploying Microsoft Unified Communications solutions. Convergent Computing created a pilot deployment of Lync Server within days and deployed it at the conference site for the sales team and executives to explore. In addition to implementing instant messaging, Convergent Computing implemented the VoIP and videoconferencing features of the software.

“When our people got their hands on the technology, they got pretty excited,” says Wolf. “Our sales team and executives immediately saw ways they could put Microsoft Unified Communications to work.”

Planning and Implementing in Phases To bring order to what would inevitably be a major series of upgrades and new deployments, Wolf and his colleagues worked with Convergent Computing to design and implement a plan for the new environment:

Infrastructure—The first phase of the Blue Coat plan updated the company’s eight-year-old directory service, replacing it with Active Directory Domain Services found in the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. The result was server consolidation, WAN optimization, greater manageability, disaster recovery functionality, and a more functional, hierarchical structure.

Email—The email system was upgraded to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, reducing capital and operating expenses while adding high availability, disaster recovery, larger mailboxes, unified messaging with voicemail and email, and faster performance.

Desktop—Desktops throughout the company were updated to the Windows 7 operating system and Microsoft Office 2010. The update and standardization improved performance, wireless and mobile capabilities, security, and integration between business productivity and unified communications capabilities.

Unified communications—The unified communications portion of the project focused on Lync Server 2010 and the Lync 2010 client. These added not just instant messaging (IM) and presence but also collaboration via desktop sharing, multiple-site videoconferencing, and VoIP interoperability with the existing Avaya phone system. Blue Coat plans to federate its instant messaging and presence system with Windows Live Messenger, AOL, and the IM and presence systems of its customers.

System management tools—Blue Coat is adopting Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 for centralized management of its far-flung company and plans to standardize on the full System Center product suite. Security at both the application and client levels is being handled by Microsoft Forefront products and by the strong security features of Blue Coat’s own products.

Document management and collaboration—The company is also adopting Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, replacing an informal system of shared folders and email.

Between November 2010 and May 2011, the company implemented the infrastructure, email, desktop, unified communications, and document

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“Upgrading to the latest Microsoft software gives our employees more than a better experience—it gives them greater confidence that these tools will always be there for them.”

Marshall Wolf, Vice President of Technology, Blue Coat Systems

management and collaboration portions of its migration and upgrade. It expects to complete the remaining portions over the next six months.

BenefitsBy adopting a Microsoft-centric infrastructure enhanced with its own WAN optimization technologies, Blue Coat Systems has made its infrastructure more reliable, boosted employee productivity, increased WAN speeds by up to 300 times, and saved up to 70 percent in capital and annual operating expenses.

Boosts Uptime by 10 Percent, to 99.99 PercentIf Wolf couldn’t keep executives and other employees throughout Blue Coat from thinking about the company’s technology systems, he at least wanted those thoughts to be good ones. Today, they are. The reliability and availability of the infrastructure and key components, such as email, calendaring, and collaboration, have increased markedly. The increase in uptime is close to 10 percent, putting uptime in the neighborhood of “the four nines”—99.99 percent. Increased uptime means less maintenance and better system utilization. It also means that email, calendaring, and related functions work the way employees expect them to, whenever they expect them to.

“We see higher employee satisfaction with email and calendaring now,” says Wolf. “But upgrading to the latest Microsoft software gives our employees more than a better experience—it gives them greater confidence that these tools will always be there for them, like water from a faucet.

And that means they can rely on them more, use them more, and benefit from them more.”

Beyond enhancing existing capabilities, the Microsoft Unified Communications solution provides entirely new ones, such as instant messaging, presence, videoconferencing, and desktop sharing. Wolf envisions Blue Coat employees making tremendous use of these capabilities as the company completes its deployment and as employees become more familiar with them.

“Increased communication and collaboration is essential for a company that wants to boost productivity, profitability, and competitiveness,” says Wolf. “In addition to those general needs, we need to overcome the communication challenges inherent in maintaining a global WAN. Microsoft Unified Communications is a key part of our answer.”

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“We need to overcome the communication challenges inherent in maintaining a global WAN. Microsoft Unified Communications is a key part of our answer.”

Marshall Wolf, Vice President of Technology, Blue Coat Systems

Reduces First-Year Costs by 70 PercentBlue Coat expected its new infrastructure to reduce costs, a goal it has fulfilled. By standardizing on Microsoft technology—for the cost of renewing its existing Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft—Blue Coat ended its reliance on a variety of vendors and eliminated substantial expenses. The company also expects unified communications to reduce the need for employee travel, leading to an anticipated 5 percent reduction in travel costs, which will save Blue Coat up to U.S.$5 million per year.

In addition to reducing recurring costs, Blue Coat says that the new infrastructure will produce significant cost avoidance. That’s because, while the anticipated workloads—especially video—will drive up WAN traffic volume, Blue Coat won’t have to buy more bandwidth to support that volume. Instead, its own technologies will enable the WAN to carry that network volume more efficiently. Wolf estimates that doubling bandwidth capacity at each of the company’s 40 offices could otherwise cost U.S.$1.6 million—a capital expense that Blue Coat will now avoid.

In all, the company expects first-year capital and operating costs to be reduced by 70 percent.

“Standardizing on Microsoft Unified Communications and infrastructure, together with our own WAN optimization technologies, is reducing costs beyond our expectations,” says Wolf.

Speeds SharePoint Server Network Performance by 300 Times“We were confident that we could use

Microsoft Unified Communications together with our own Blue Coat WAN optimization products to successfully connect our centralized infrastructure in Sunnyvale with our remote offices around the world,” says Wolf. “But we were still excited to see the proof.”

That proof includes a performance increase of up to 300 times (30,000 percent) in SharePoint Server when used with the Blue Coat ProxySG 9000 MACH5 WAN Op product. The company’s use of Exchange Server together with its own encrypted MAPI protocol acceleration speeds email transactions by a factor of 34.

In addition, through its use of its PacketShaper 12000, Blue Coat was able to adopt Lync Server and a Polycom videoconferencing system without incurring investments in network upgrades and additional bandwidth. “Video is a huge issue for our customers,” says Wolf. “Showing what Lync Server and the PacketShaper 12000 can do without additional network investments is really impressive. With the network visibility we get with PacketShaper, we can differentiate between IM, voice, video, and desktop sharing—which we use to tune our limited network resources for optimal performance.”

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“Showing what Lync Server and the PacketShaper 12000 can do without additional network investments is really impressive.”

Marshall Wolf, Vice President of Technology, Blue Coat Systems

Microsoft Server Product PortfolioFor more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:www.microsoft.com/servers

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Convergent Computing products and services, call (510) 444-5700 or visit the website at: www.cco.com

For more information about Blue Coat Systems products and services, call (866) 302-2628 or visit the website at: www.bluecoat.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published September 2011

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2008 R2− Microsoft Exchange Server 2010− Microsoft Forefront− Microsoft Lync Server 2010− Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010− Microsoft System Center

Configuration Manager 2007 R2

Microsoft Office− Microsoft Lync 2010− Microsoft Office 2010

Windows 7 Enterprise Technologies− Active Directory Domain Services

Partners Convergent Computing