VPN Services

The Netherlands is one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, with limited scope for further property development. Its construction industry is mature, and the housing market for new properties is shrinking because of a stable population and limited land available for development. This has meant that innovative property developers and construction companies need to look closely at all aspects of their daily operations to secure their future revenue streams.

Construction company Van Wijnen Groep is no exception. With 1400 employees, the company is a leader in housing and commercial property construction in the Netherlands and only one of a few to be maintaining strong profits of US$14.7 million on an annual turnover of US$481 million.

One strategy for maintaining growth is to expand into new areas, such as new property development and building maintenance and management, which will spread risk across other segments of the market. A second, more internally focused, strategy has been to digitize more of its documentation, to improve information flow across the highly dispersed and mobile workforce through an IP VPN, increasing staff productivity and project accuracy, enhancing customer service, and helping to enable tighter control of operating costs.

Important to Van Wijnen's move to improve the flow of information has been the deployment of a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which allows very detailed technical construction documents to be stored electronically for easy access across the organization. Citrix terminal application support software is used to minimize data traffic across the network.

The final, and most essential, part of the solution was to implement a high-speed WAN that would support the rapid exchange of digital documents across multiple dispersed locations. The ERP system would not only make teams more effective and more accurate in their project planning and execution, it would also help them to present up-to-the-minute information when dealing with client projects and avoid unnecessary work caused by using out-of-date information.

Van Wijnen approached its incumbent service provider about meeting its WAN needs for the ERP deployment, and the service provider maintained that Frame Relay offered the best way forward. But with only days before the contract was due to be signed, Bertus Roest, head of information and communications technology (ICT) at Van Wijnen, received a surprise call from Versatel Telecom International.

Founded in 1995, Versatel is an ambitious telecommunications company operating in the Dutch, Belgian, and German markets. Today Versatel has more than 1600 employees and more than 1 million customers. The company has an extensive portfolio of fixed telephony, data, Internet, and, more recently, mobile telephony products.

"At the time that we went to the market for a WAN solution, there seemed to be only one provider that could deliver a Frame Relay offering with the right level of bandwidth to all of our sites, including several remote locations," says Roest. When Versatel offered a technically better, more flexible service at the same price, Roest was skeptical but gave the company the opportunity to submit a formal proposal. Versatel's solution was as elegant as it was powerful. An optical fiber link running at 10 Mbps connects Van Wijnen's headquarters to Versatel's core IP Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network and provides Internet access for the entire company. The other 19 sites connect to the MPLS core (typically through Cisco 1720 modular access routers) using DSL links at 128 kbps, 512 kbps, or 1 Mbps to form a secure IP VPN for the group.

Understanding how critical the ERP application is to Van Wijnen as well as the customer's need to be able to access project documents from any location at any time, Versatel not only proposed a separate ISDN backup circuit for the headquarters site, it laid the circuit on the opposite side of the building from the optical fiber link to further safeguard service.

Van Wijnen was particularly impressed at such attention to detail because the incumbent provider had proposed routing the backup link in the same cable as normal traffic. The other sites in the network also benefit from ISDN backup to help ensure 100 percent network availability.

"Versatel's MPLS-based solution represents the next generation of technology and was far more attractive than Frame Relay because its any-to-any connectivity means that you don't have to set up the complex mesh of virtual private circuits required for Frame Relay-based VPNs," says Roest.

Versatel's IP class of service (CoS) model differentiates Van Wijnen's business-critical applications from its standard applications. This way, technical parameters such as latency and jitter can be controlled to help ensure that Van Wijnen's critical ERP traffic is assigned top priority across the network. Less delay-sensitive e-mail is classified Silver CoS, and any other traffic, Bronze CoS. Real-time applications can be handled in the real-time class of the CoS model (Platinum).

Roest says: "We decided to adopt Versatel's managed MPLS service because we don't have the resources internally to keep up with the latest technical issues. The MPLS network has been pivotal in helping to ensure the quality of service we need for our ERP system, which is used by our users 90 percent of their working day."

The capability of any-to-any connectivity provided by MPLS is also benefiting Van Wijnen. "Versatel's intelligent, managed IP VPN solution means that location no longer mattered because the different branches deal directly with each other without the cumbersome end-to-end peering between branches," says Roest. Compared to a typical hub-and-spoke topology, this helped to alleviate bottlenecks at the head office, which was essential to Van Wijnen's goal of relying more heavily on digital documents, ultimately leading to increased traffic on the network.

It took just four months to migrate Van Wijnen to Versatel's MPLS network. Asked why he chose a managed service, Roest emphasizes the fundamental importance of the network to the company and the need to help ensure maximum uptime. "We wanted to make someone absolutely responsible for the operational management of the network," he says. "As a service provider, Versatel has a lot more experience than we could possibly have in managing networks, and they have the people and processes in place to quickly and effectively react to problems."

By giving Versatel this responsibility, Van Wijnen's in-house team has more time to focus on technology to better support its business, rather than just dealing with day-to-day operational issues.

Van Wijnen is one of a fast-growing group of companies enjoying the benefits of Versatel's approach to offering the latest network technology and value-added services to customers. A vital ingredient of its recipe for success is its IP vision.

Martin Schelling, Versatel's product manager for VPN services in the Netherlands, explains how the company's IP VPN services are a vital part of the company's strategy to win business:

"Our IP VPN services are very important to our commercial success. Commercially they are attractive and, while the corporate market and medium-sized businesses have adopted the IP VPN service very quickly, we are also very successful in the small-business market, thanks to the flexibility of the service and the lower cost of ownership compared to older generation technology. Our strategy is to grow our IP VPN business to help enable us to also provide next-generation IP-based services, including managed voice."

Within the corporate market, Versatel expects strong annual growth of around 50 percent for its IP VPN services. Its presence is particularly strong in the market for government institutions, large enterprises, and medium-sized businesses. Versatel also provides a wide range of services to many small businesses. In this sector, the company expects to see a 300 percent growth rate in 2004 driven by IP VPN services. An important part of that strategy will be the development of industry-segment-specific solutions tailored to promote collaboration within specific communities of interest, such as services to healthcare workers and payment transaction services for retailers.

In developing its IP VPN services, Versatel worked closely with Cisco Systems. Versatel's MPLS core network was deployed in 2001 with 10 fully redundant IP points of presence (POPs) across the Netherlands and Belgium, connected on Dynamic Packet Transport (DPT) rings. DPT, a Resilient Packet Ring technology, combines the intelligence of IP routing with the bandwidth efficiency of optical rings.

Versatel's MPLS network has earned the Cisco Powered Network designation because it is built end to end with Cisco equipment, including the Cisco 12000 Series routers, Cisco 7500 Series routers, and Cisco 7200 Series routers as access devices. Customer premises equipment (CPE) provided by Versatel ranges from Cisco SOHO 70 Series routers to Cisco 7200 Series routers. For Van Wijnen, Versatel provides Cisco 1720 modular access routers at each site.

Versatel's portfolio of MPLS-based network services has expanded considerably and now includes General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) access, fallback solutions, a range of encryption offerings for enhanced security, and online reporting, which is important for managed network service customers that want to check the status of their network performance.

Another value-added service is IP telephony using Cisco CallManager, which Versatel introduced in 2003 with the addition of a prioritized Platinum CoS. Van Wijnen is piloting this managed voice service for 33 users in a new office facility and plans to deploy voice over IP (VoIP) across the company if the trial proves successful. Says Roest, "When we chose MPLS, we had IP telephony in the back of our minds; the fact that Versatel could offer us an appropriate CoS support was a real plus for the company."

According to Roest, Van Wijnen's interest in IP telephony is largely based on three factors: the significant level of internal voice traffic between its headquarters and 19 other locations, which use the toll-free MPLS IP VPN; its need to replace some of its older private branch exchanges (PBXs); and the discount Van Wijnen receives when using Versatel's phone services.

The deployment of IP telephony will further aid the mobility of Van Wijnen's staff because Cisco CallManager helps enable users' phone extensions to follow them, no matter where they are when they log into the network.

In the future, Van Wijnen also hopes to add wireless functions to its network so that its employees can access vital construction project data and documents from the field. Plans for next year also include extending IP-based extranet VPNs to its customers as an additional value-added offering that will further enhance customer service and help expand market share.

Vital to achieving all of these plans is the strong relationship that Van Wijnen has established with Versatel. "We have an excellent partnership because our communication is very direct. The fact that Versatel works closely with Cisco adds to our confidence. We know Cisco to be a strong networking supplier with good products and a full suite of networking solutions," says Roest. "Our main priority, however, was the overall solution. Versatel could deliver the whole package and support our future vision."

For more information about managed services, including Cisco managed IP VPN, Metro Ethernet, managed voice, and managed network security solutions, please refer to http://www.cisco.com/go/managedservices.

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