Anticimex

Anticimex is an international pest control specialist. Formed in Sweden in 1934, the business has operations in 16 countries. Its services span insurance, building management and food safety.

It is an increasingly digital business. Anticimex uses cameras, traps and data collection points that are remote and connected and shares reports in real-time with customers. The nature of pest control is local, and Anticimex staff need to be mobile and collaborative in order to provide their services to customers.

Challenges

• Improve network performance to support move to centralized IT service delivery
• Provide a platform for growth of digital services
• Reduce the strain on internal IT resource

Solution

• Riverbed SteelHead for optimized WAN performance
• Centralized management of application performance with Riverbed SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead
• Managed service from local Riverbed partner, Anzena

Benefits

• Creates a high-performance national network capable of supporting centralized IT service delivery
• Establishes platform for development of new, digital services
• Reduces maintenance and licence costs, and frees internal resource to focus on high-value IT projects

Challenges: Building a platform to centralize IT services

The Swedish head office is in Stockholm, and there are 36 branch offices and 10 satellite offices. These range in size from 100 staff to five or six. Tommy Bergqvist, CEO at local IT consultancy, Anzena, explains: “Anticimex had an MPLS copper connection going into each office, but the bandwidth varied greatly. There were 50mbps in some of the larger offices, less than 10mbps in the smaller ones.”

With the business looking to centralize much of its IT services, such inconsistency was unacceptable. “We wanted to eliminate branch file servers – with all the local maintenance and back-ups involved, replacing them with a centralized server. But that is unworkable if the office is 600km from Stockholm and you’re working with such slow MPLS speeds,” says Sepand Astaneh, Senior Operations Engineer at Anticimex. “We needed to maximise our connectivity.”