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Voice Over IP

IT Detective Work Helps End WAN Slowdown for Construction Firm

Management app finds that Internet radio is the culprit

Matt Hamblen Today’s Top Stories

or Other Software Stories

December 5, 2005 (Computerworld) --

When users at Perini Corp. complained early this year about slow performance when using critical hosted project management software, IT managers scratched their heads and undertook a little detective work.

"Truthfully, when people say the Internet is slow, you have no idea what's going on," Kim Holden, IT director at the Framingham, Mass.-based global construction company, said last week. "There are a lot of finger-pointing exercises."

More than 250 workers at Perini's corporate headquarters use Primavera Systems Inc.'s Expedition project management software. It is hosted by LoadSpring Solutions Inc., an application service provider in Lawrence, Mass., on servers accessed over T1 links in a WAN.

"With third-party hosting, you're never sure if the problem is on their end, so you have to eliminate some of the causes and make sure you're not just shooting in the dark," Holden said. Expedition, widely used in the construction industry, wasn't considered the culprit.

To find and fix the problem, Perini's small IT staff first looked at using intrusion- detection software and then eyed packet shaping to improve network performance. The staff decided instead to use traffic management software, choosing Converted Traffic Manager (CTM) from Converged Access Inc. in Billerica, Mass.

Holden said the CTM software can create traffic categories based on business priorities, a key requirement for her group.

Setting Priorities

The software, installed in August for less than $10,000, prioritizes WAN traffic based on Perini's list of the most critical traffic streams, Holden said. E-mail and voice over IP (VoIP) between Framingham and other Perini offices around the world were judged to be the highest priority. FTP traffic was given a medium to low priority, and the lowest priority was given to user access to Internet radio sites, she said.

"We discovered people were listening to radio online more than I thought, and that was taking most of the traffic," Holden said.

Once Internet radio traffic was relegated to the lowest priority, its performance dropped, as did the number of people listening to it.

"I didn't have to slap anybody's hands and say, 'No, you can't listen to Internet radio,'" Holden said. In fact, users simply stopped using Internet radio when performance lagged.

"We haven't heard a 'boo' from anybody since CTM was put in place," Holden said, noting that her staff no longer must spend significant time logging complaints into the project management software.

Perini is considering using other Converged Access products next year to compress VoIP traffic between global offices, especially in Iraq, Afghanistan and several U.S. locations, she said.

The market for WAN traffic management is growing, since customers can see sizable results from a relatively small investment, said Matthias Machowinski, an analyst at Infonetics Inc. in Campbell, Calif.

The market for such products is small compared with the overall routing market and is currently valued in the "low hundreds" of millions of dollars annually, he said.

Other companies offering such tools include Packeteer Inc., Allot Communications Inc., Expand Networks Inc., Peribit Networks Inc., which was recently purchased by Juniper Networks Inc., and Swan Labs Corp., which was recently purchased by F5 Networks Inc.

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