Bechtel Increases Network Throughput And Guarantees VoIP Quality Without Bandwidth Upgrade.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

ROSELAND, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 7, 2003

-- Bechtel Saves $167,000 Annually While Boosting WAN

Capacity by 10 Times with Expand ACCELERATORs --

Expand Networks, a leader in bandwidth optimization technology today announced that Bechtel, a multi-billion-dollar engineering construction firm has deployed Expand's ACCELERATOR 4000, 4800 and 2700 Series to improve remote access connectivity and guarantee application performance, including critical VoIP traffic over the wide area network (WAN).

Bechtel is one of the world's largest engineering-construction firms, providing premier technical, management services to develop, manage, engineer, build, and operate installations for customers worldwide. Over 47,000 Bechtel employees are teamed with customers, partners, and suppliers on 950 projects in 67 countries. With such a highly distributed organization, WAN costs are not trivial, especially the costs of international lines.

"When we started seeing peaks between 75-80% WAN utilization, we were concerned about the impact it would have on our VoIP quality," said Ashish Deshpande, network engineer for Bechtel. "We also wanted to increase data throughput for other critical networked services such as InfoWorks, Oracle database replication and Citrix remote access, but we were confronted with WAN congestion which we did not want to solve through expensive bandwidth upgrades."

To address these issues, Bechtel deployed Expand's ACCELERATORs in multiple domestic and international locations including: Houston Texas, Frederick Maryland, McLean Virginia, Trinidad, New Delhi and Moscow. The engineering firm has seen an average of 10 times increase in network capacity in these locations and application throughput and performance has dramatically improved.

"The increased capacity delivered by Expand cleared up our WAN congestion problems, improved application access, guaranteed VoIP performance and most importantly Expand has saved Bechtel over $167,000 annually when compared to the costs of larger WAN circuits," continued Mr. Deshpande. These savings provide Bechtel with a hard-dollar ROI of approximately 9 months.

"Global organizations like Bechtel are helping us sharpen our vision and execution of improving branch office connectivity with demanding latency sensitive traffic in the most challenging network environments, said Pedro Colaco, vice president of Marketing, Expand Networks.

About Expand

Networks Expand Networks pioneered the development of bandwidth boosting appliances - the ACCELERATORs - which increase network capacity by 100 -400+%. The ACCELERATORs eliminate the need for costly WAN link upgrades, enabling quicker deployments of new applications to remote offices. Networked applications such as CRM, Email, ERP, Thin Client and XML increase the strain on scarce WAN resources, often hindering productivity. By removing repeat data patterns found in any type of traffic, the ACCELERATORs provide important bandwidth savings. The end-result is the decrease in network congestion, which in turn speeds up data transfers. Expand Networks allows enterprises to support more networked users, applications and services with fewer resources delivering a typical ROI of 3 to 9 months. Clients include: Motorola, Texas Instruments, Hitachi Capital and the United States Department of Defense. Expand Networks is headquartered in Roseland, New Jersey with offices in Israel, Italy, United Kingdom and throughout the United States. To learn more, visit www.expand.com or call (888) 8921250.

Expand Networks, ACCELERATOR 6800, ACCELERATOR 4800, ACCELERATOR 4002, ACCELERATOR 4000, ACCELERATOR 2800, ACCELERATOR 2750 and ACCELERATOR 1800 are trademarks of Expand Networks, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.