Acme, a Global Manufacturer

Acme is the sample enterprise. Acme makes machine tools for the global manufacturing industry.

Acme's Global Span

Acme's corporate HQ is located in Chicago. It has regional HQ locations in London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Melbourne for the regions of EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), Japan and Northern Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australia, respectively. Acme has approximately 300 branch offices located around the globe.

Business Desires of Acme's Management

From a business perspective, Acme is looking to improve its business by increasing productivity and raising customer satisfaction. Acme executives hope to achieve this through global standardization of business processes. This will allow Acme to pool global resources and offer greater knowledge transfer between regions of the globe, ultimately reducing operational expenses. Common processes and enhanced knowledge share will also increase customer satisfaction by ensuring that customers have access to all of Acme's resources, not a limited subset.

In addition, Acme is focusing on cost-reduction efforts by challenging managers and contributors alike to focus on core effortsitems that deliver direct value to Acme. To do this, Acme is actively identifying areas of its operations that can easily be standardized and outsourced to other organizations that can perform the tasks with the same or better quality at a lower cost to Acme. These areas are called context efforts.

Acme's IT Applications Base

Acme has a well-established base of applications it uses to manage most existing business processes. It has a few regional implementations of SAP business process software to manage business administration, sales, and service. Acme IT is looking to consolidate these regional implementations as business processes are unified globally.

Acme Engineering has a fairly extensive CAD/CAM implementation for its engineers who design the machines and tools for its manufacturing customers. This CAD/CAM system is heavily integrated with the manufacturing process carried out by its partner manufacturers, which make the physical goods that Acme produces.

Acme IT is preparing to support a handful of new collaboration tools to address Acme's business goals:

• Acme is actively searching for an e-learning application suite to manage training and employee development for its global workforce.

• Videoconferencing is an important part of Acme's strategy to bring global groups together. Acme wants to upgrade its existing room-based system to leverage its IP network and is investigating desktop videoconferencing. Acme also wants to leverage videoconferencing technology to collaborate with its extranet partners and external customers where appropriate.

• Document sharing and IM are also key parts of enabling the type of global collaboration that Acme executives are looking to achieve. Acme is investigating a number of solutions to assist global groups in collaborating on solutions for customers.

• Acme also wants to enable a higher level of resiliency through distributed data centers that lower latency time to critical applications. It also wants to provide a failover location in case of a major disaster at their primary facility.

Acme's IT Communications Infrastructure

Acme's communications infrastructure consists of five major components:

• An intranet data network consisting of private line links between regional HQ locations and ATM and Frame Relay from regional HQ locations to branch offices.

• A voice network of PBXs. In regional HQ locations, these PBXs are interconnected through VoIP trunks provisioned over the data network. Branch offices have voice connectivity to the PSTN only.

• Videoconferencing based on H.320 ISDN technology. All regional HQ offices and key branch sites have room-based videoconferencing equipment, connected via ISDN BRI lines to the PSTN.

• An extranet data network consisting of private-line, Frame Relay, and VPN links to approximately 100 partner businesses. These 100 businesses represent a very wide range of outsourced tasks for Acme, from corporate administration tasks such as payroll and benefits administration to core business functions such as component suppliers and contract manufacturers.

• An Internet-facing demilitarized zone (DMZ) network built to offer its customers online access to sales and service with Acme in a secure fashion.

Acme IT is studying how it can converge these applications to reduce cost. It wants to make this a key point in its investigation into a new WAN. Acme's IT management team also wants to identify the context areas of operation and search out partners or service providers that can offer those context services at a better value to Acme.

Because employees in any office in Acme or its partners will use many of these applications, it is important that latency be optimized in Acme's network.

Acme's Intranet: Backbone WAN

Acme's global backbone WAN, as mentioned previously, is made up of private-line links between regional HQ locations. Acme has purchased DS-3 (45-Mbps) private lines from a global service provider to interconnect the regional HQ locations and the corporate HQ.

Figure 1-3 shows Acme's global backbone WAN.

Figure 1-3. Acme's Global Backbone WAN

Acme has provisioned backup connectivity between these sites by purchasing redundant private lines from a second global carrier.

One of the challenges that Acme IT is concerned about is the granularity of these leased lines. In several locations, Acme is beginning to see high bandwidth utilization. However, to upgrade, Acme must justify a cost increase for three times the bandwidth, jumping from T3/E3 to OC-3/STM-1 speeds and installing new circuits. This represents a significant cost increase in Acme's budget for bandwidth. Acme would like the opportunity to scale bandwidth more easily. While ATM could provide the granularity of bandwidth that Acme is looking for, Acme IT has found that ATM pricing above approximately 20 to 30 Mbps was not competitive with leased-line pricing. In addition, Acme was concerned about the overhead of IP over ATM, also known as the cell tax, which can range from 25 percent to 35 percent of the total link bandwidth.

Acme's Intranet: Regional WANs

To connect branch offices with the regional HQ locations, Acme purchases Frame Relay or ATM connectivity from regional service providers. At the region's HQ location, Acme purchases ATM service on a DS-3 port and an individual PVC to each branch site, which receives T1, E1, or nxT1/E1 access ports.

Branch sites receive between 256 Kbps and 8 Mbps of bandwidth, depending on the business function the branch office serves. Engineering sites receive 6 to 8 Mbps of bandwidth to support CAD/CAM functionality, while sales sites typically receive between 256 Kbps and 4 Mbps of bandwidth, depending on size and bandwidth cost. When bandwidth to a branch office is between 256 Kbps and T1/E1 (1.5 to 2 Mbps), Frame Relay is used; when speeds greater than 1.5 to 2 Mbps are needed, Inverse Multiplexing for ATM (IMA) is used.