Pet care is big business, and one of the dominant players in the industry is Merial. When the animal healthcare company decided to centralize its key business applications, the project spawned a handful of related IT projects, including a WAN optimization deployment designed to speed data center backups and boost application delivery worldwide.

A joint venture between Merck & Co. and sanofi-aventis, Merial employs more than 5,000 employees and operates in more than 150 countries worldwide. Some of its consumer pet supply brands include Heartgard and Frontline. The company’s global headquarters is in Atlanta, and its second-largest hub is in France.

A few years ago, Merial executives made the decision to consolidate the company’s ERP systems and move toward a single instance for global ERP. In addition, the company decided to run its centralized ERP system out of a third-party hosting facility. As Merial moved forward with efforts to streamline its data center resources, the issue of application performance became a key consideration given Merial’s increasingly distributed user population

“We’re consolidating down to two ERP systems -- Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics -- and we’re centralizing them globally. There will be no more local installations or regional installations. It’s all going to be globally hosted with a third-party provider,” explains Derek Johnson, director of global networks at Merial. “So now we have a distributed user base, which is going to require LAN-like performance across a wide-area network for all their applications.”

Naturally, there were new challenges to tackle. “The challenges were excessive latency, real time bandwidth management, and traditional non-optimized application development,” Johnson says.

In 2007 and 2008, Merial made some improvements to begin to address performance. For example, the company upgraded bandwidth in some of its locations, initiated service improvements with its WAN provider, and implemented quality of service (QoS) technology on its WAN links.

“But you can’t just continue to upgrade bandwidth. At some point you’re going to have to say enough is enough,” Johnson explains. So early in 2008, Merial looked to optimize its network technology.

“Some of our goals were to detect, identify and prevent infrastructure vulnerabilities that can impact business application performance; and to be able to manage the process to communicate, track and escalate performance issues by having a device that’s inline, so we could see specific packets going through and identify specific applications by port.”

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.