Case Study: A.T. Kearney achieves infrastructure cost savings and improved application availability with F5 Networks' BIG-IP

Consulting Firm Avoids Significant Infrastructure Costs, Improves Application Availability

A.T. Kearney, a global management consulting firm with about 3,500 users across 52 offices, needed secure, high‑availability access to Microsoft Office, SharePoint, OCS/Lync and other unified communications tools for a largely mobile workforce without expanding costly branch infrastructure. The firm determined its existing Cisco-based load balancing forced an active/passive data center model and degraded application performance, and so evaluated vendors — ultimately selecting F5 Networks and its BIG-IP solutions (LTM and GTM) to address those challenges.

F5 Networks deployed BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager and Global Traffic Manager (along with BIG-IP WebAccelerator, iRules and F5’s Lync Application Ready Solution) to enable active/active data centers, dynamic traffic routing, security and application acceleration. The deployment eliminated the need for new branch infrastructure (avoiding an estimated ~$60,000/month in licensing and infrastructure costs and potential savings of roughly $1–2M per site per year), allowed repurposing of servers to branch roles, and produced dramatic performance gains — pages that once took a minute now load in under five seconds — with higher availability and far fewer performance-related support calls.

A.T. Kearney

Kevin Rice

Global Network Architect