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| Millipore is a leading multinational bioscience company that provides technologies, tools and services for the development and production of new therapeutic drugs. Dedicated to globally servicing its multinational biopharmaceutical customers, biotech start-ups and laboratories, the Billerica, Massachusetts-based company serves the worldwide life science research, biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. Millipore employs 4,200 people in 10 manufacturing plants and more than 31 offices around the world. Outgrowing its existing network, Millipore was looking for a new data communications partner that could provide a perfect mix of financial stability, customer service and technical superiority. After an exhaustive review of competitive offerings, Millipore chose NTT Communications (NTT Com). The Challenges With interest in the company's products and services growing at a steady pace, Millipore came to realize that the current network backbone, which relied heavily on Frame Relay, would not meet its long-term business goals. Moreover, the existing bandwidth availability quickly proved inadequate, while traditional upgrade options were not cost effective. Therefore, company executives embarked on a search for a more stable, flexible and cost effective way to ensure all offices were operating as one seamless team worldwide, and that would help catapult the company to the next level of its business evolution. Millipore required a vendor that could not only provide expansive global network and technology expertise, but also the proven approach, single point of contact and financial stability found in a long term partner. The Solution In line with Millipore's future needs, NTT Com designed a new IP-based Virtual Private Network (IP-VPN) using the MPLS protocol over a private backbone. Therefore, Millipore would have the benefit of leveraging the ubiquity and cost effectiveness of IP for its data needs, while maintaining the connection quality that the company has come to expect from their previous network. NTT Com brought three additional benefits to the Millipore relationship that helped distinguish it from the competition. The first was the quality of its engineering team. Having worked on global IP-VPN configurations for many years, NTT Com brought a level of detail to the network design that ensured Millipore's transition from Frame Relay was transparent to end-users. NTT Com also brought an unmatched level of customer support, with a local point of contact that is available at a moment's notice and provides local access coupled with global accountability. The final benefit NTT Com brought to the table was financial stability, as a part of the world's largest telecommunications company. The Results Having rolled out the new worldwide network, Millipore has already begun to benefit from the switch to its private IP-VPN — both in terms of dollar savings and efficiency gains. After moving to a global IP-VPN running MPLS, Millipore experienced a doubling of overall bandwidth through the better utilization of network capacity. The company was also able to run new enterprise resource planning software throughout the company's global network to speed product delivery, enhance global communications, improve inventory turns and better satisfy the critical needs of customers. Future plans call for Millipore to continue to increase its bottom line savings by deploying new technologies and adding more offices to the network. Some of the added technologies the company is considering include single site global planning and rapid deployment of e-business practices. |
