BIG-IP WebAccelerator solution chosen to enhance network stability and application performance for 12,000 SAP users 

CHERTSEY, UK, JUNE 17, 2008 – F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), today announced that British American Tobacco (BAT) has chosen F5® acceleration solutions to provide a stable and reliable network that supports a global SAP application portal. Implementation was aided through BAT’s use of the F5 Application Ready Network for SAP, which provides tested and documented best practices and guidance for optimising SAP applications with F5 BIG-IP® solutions.

An established user of SAP solutions, BAT set out to create a global SAP application portal to help reduce application delivery and maintenance costs while maintaining operational efficiencies. Before launching two SAP human resource applications on the new portal, BAT wanted to make sure that its network infrastructure would be able to deliver the high performance users expect.

“A few years ago we experienced a succession of stability problems when we rolled out an SAP SRM solution globally; we did not want to make the same mistake twice,” said Brian Lane, Global Portal Solutions Centre Manager at BAT. “Based on our past experience, we immediately knew that we had to have a web acceleration device, particularly because we were experiencing varying network speeds around the globe.”

“As we were already using F5 solutions for application and WAN security—and are very impressed with their functionality—we decided to test F5’s web acceleration product alongside our existing device on the SAP SRM application. We found F5 significantly shortened application download times and increased response times by 45 percent for users,” continued Lane.

BAT is rolling out the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM™) solution with WebAccelerator® module to provide consistently high performance for BAT’s 12,000 SAP users around the world. The implementation is supported by network security partner ITC.

“Based on our knowledge of F5 and the results of the competitive evaluation, we felt very confident in recommending BIG-IP solutions to BAT,” said Brat Milborrow, Senior Security Consultant at ITC. “As well as improved performance, we felt that there would be long-term advantages for BAT from selecting a product that could meet both its web acceleration and WAN security requirements in one integrated solution.”

“The terrific thing is that F5 provides so many important features straight out of the box, including web acceleration, load balancing, caching, compression, and security, with a single graphical interface,” added Lane. “With the product’s ability to handle caching and compression, for example, we’re expected to cut operation costs at some of our data centres where we pay per volume of network traffic.” 

The F5 BIG-IP product family delivers high availability, improved performance, application security, and access control, all in one highly adaptable unit. For more information, please visit www.f5.com/products/big-ip.

For more information on British American Tobacco, please click here or visit www.bat.com.