Case Study: A.T. Kearney achieves major infrastructure cost avoidance and improved application availability with F5 Networks (BIG-IP)

Consulting Firm Avoids Significant Infrastructure Costs, Improves Application Availability

Kearney, a global management consulting firm with roughly 3,500 users across 52 offices, needed secure, highly available access to email, unified communications and other business applications for a largely remote workforce. The firm was constrained by an active/passive data-center model and faced the prospect of costly, distributed infrastructure in branch offices. To solve this, Kearney selected F5 Networks and its BIG-IP family (BIG-IP LTM and BIG-IP GTM, plus Application Ready Solution for Lync and WebAccelerator) to modernize traffic management and application delivery.

F5 Networks deployed BIG-IP LTM devices in each data center and BIG-IP GTM to intelligently route traffic between sites, placing Microsoft application servers behind the BIG‑IPs to enable active/active operations, acceleration, and security. The solution avoided substantial branch infrastructure costs (licensing estimates of about $60K/month and total savings roughly $1–2M+ per site annually), allowed repurposing of servers to branch and virtualization use, and dramatically improved performance and availability — pages that once took a minute now load in under five seconds and user support calls for performance issues have essentially disappeared.

Kearney

Kevin Rice

Global Network Architect