Bland Bankart Deploys Expand To Enable Real-Time Brokering And Risk-Management Transactions.

Business Editors

READING, United Kingdom--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 16, 2004

More Efficiently Managed WAN Leads to Savings of

Thousands of Pounds Per Year

Expand Networks, the leading provider of WAN compression and acceleration appliances, today announced that Bland Bankart, one of the largest independent retail insurance broking, risk management and financial services companies in the United Kingdom has deployed Expand Networks' ACCELERATORs to increase the volume of data throughput over the existing WAN links allowing users to transact business in real time.

The Bland Bankart corporate wide area network was subject to increasingly heavy usage and becoming prone to congestion slowing the delivery of applications and services such as Internet browsing, MS Exchange and the main back office brokering platform, to the remote sites. The mounting level of network traffic and subsequent bottlenecks might have compromised the level of service the company could provide to its satellite offices, which Bland Bankart was anxious to avoid.

"The amount of traffic we sent was more than the WAN was originally designed to carry, leading to data transmission queues that could, ultimately, have lead to delays in business response times," said Stan Hulme, Group IT Manager, Bland Bankart plc. " We undertook a comprehensive test of competing technologies but chose Expand because it delivered much more than traditional bandwidth shaping - the ACCELERATORs increase available WAN capacity, prioritize traffic, and provide valuable monitoring capabilities on the utilization of network resources. The ACCELERATORs were instrumental in managing our WAN resources more efficiently by liberating more bandwidth and helping us to manage PCs and servers from the central site."

"In the financial sector, time is money and information needs to be provided immediately to enable businesses to be highly flexible and responsive to market," said Pedro Colaco, vice president of marketing at Expand Networks. " Expand has again demonstrated its ability to get the very best out of an enterprise network, dramatically improving network throughput and delivering true ROI."

"Bland Bankart experienced on average a 300% increase in speed on their WAN with peaks of up to 1000% after implementing Expand's products, ensuring that the financial applications they depend on were performing to the maximum," said Jonathan Hallatt, spokesperson from Azzuri Data Ltd, local UK Expand channel partner.

Stan Hulme continued, "Expand Networks' ACCELERATOR has allowed the company to take advantage of our existing resources without costly upgrades. Real time business transactions has led to higher productivity levels ensuring the products paid for themselves within the year and saved us nearly GBP 15,000 over the course of the year."

About Bland Bankart

Bland Bankart plc is one of the largest independent retail insurance brokers, risk management and financial services companies in the United Kingdom.

The group employs over 260 staff in offices located in Leicester, Birmingham, London, Luton, and Nottingham.

Bland Bankart is part of an expanding European and Global network, with facilities for arranging and servicing insurance, risk management and financial services programs throughout the world.

About Expand Networks

Expand Networks is the leading provider of WAN compression and acceleration appliances with 87% market share. The ACCELERATORs eliminate the need for costly WAN link upgrades by increasing average network capacity by 100-400% with peaks of 1000+%. Expand's patented technology enables quicker deployments of new applications to remote offices. Its unique features - acceleration, traffic discovery, application visibility and Instant QoS allow enterprises to support more networked users, applications and services with fewer resources delivering a typical ROI of 3 to 9 months. Expand has shipped over 20,000 units to more than 800 customers including Motorola, Texas Instruments 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 [phone].

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