Colgate Palmolive plans to have much better application performance on its corporate intranet in the coming months, according to Arthur Fleiss, IT architect at Colgate Palmolive in Piscataway, N.J.

"We have well over 100 offices worldwide with 20,000 users and the pages just took too long to load," Fleiss says. "When I took a trip to a different location and could barely use the intranet, that's when I decided we needed to do something."

The company had been experiencing performance problems with applications running on the corporate intranet and Fleiss says the company plans to expand the number of applications online to help employees worldwide access more data. Earlier this year, Fleiss started to look into application front-end (AFE) technologies from the likes of Cisco, Crescendo Networks, NetApp (the AFE business was recently acquired by Blue Coat Systems), Stratacache and Stampede Technologies.

Fleiss knew what he was looking for and set out to find tools to match his specific criteria. For one, in his quest to improve end-user response times, he says he didn't want to invest in more bandwidth, to change application code, to install software on servers, to put devices in more than 100 offices or to change client devices.

"I wanted to get response time results by making minimal changes done to our environment," he explains. Crescendo's Maestro appliance rose to the top during Fleiss's evaluation because it met several criteria. The vendor's asymmetric approach to speeding traffic and the capabilities loaded into one box (for instance, ports that handle gigabit speeds) should suit Fleiss's network, he says. Fleiss has been testing the appliance and plans to roll it out to a live production network in the next month or so. He hopes to get the same results as other IT managers have after using Crescendo.

Yet based on the tests, he'd still like to get a better read on performance before the box and after the box - and the percent changed. He says he'd have to depend on a traffic analysis, or sniffer-type probe, tool to get those metrics now.

"Ideally, I'd like it if the vendor could build some metrics right into the appliance that would tell me about performance," Fleiss says.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.