Premier Community Bank uses Expand

Premier Community Bank in Marion, Wis., recently signed on with Expand Networks to use the company’s bandwidth optimization technology to help the bank network maintain Web and application service at its smaller locations.

The bank deployed Expand Networks’ Accelerator 2800 and 1800 Series to help the bank save money by eliminating the need for WAN link upgrades. By removing repeat data patterns found in any type of traffic, Expand’s accelerators can save bandwidth.

Expand says its accelerators also enable IT departments to more quickly deploy new applications to remote offices.

Premier Community Bank just implemented a new teller system and an accounting platform, and then found the applications tend to consume much bandwidth. The bank runs all its financial applications using Citrix, but remote access still proved to be a challenge, with degraded response times.

Pat Mielke, senior vice president of operations at Premier Community Bank, said in a statement that the potential upgrade needed to support the new applications would have required an “infrastructure overhaul.” She said the bank used 64K bit/sec WAN links and that implementing Accelerators would increase the capacity of those links by five to 10 times. Mielke said the results were impressive.

“Our remote offices reported that WAN performance of all networked services was comparable to accessing these applications from our headquarters,” Mielke said in the statement. “But the real benefit was our ability to cost-effectively continue servicing smaller rural communities which other banks have abandoned because they could not keep costs down.”