www.alfalaval.com

solutions:

• Web Application Accelerator

Download the Alfa Laval Case Study

• Improved site performance by 92%
• Reduced bandwidth requirements by 66%
• Avoided up to $1 million annually in infratructure costs
• Avoided need to expand infrastructure
• Eliminated complaints about site performance

Alfa Laval, based in Sweden, provides heating and cooling solutions to a variety of industries, including pharmaceutical, life sciences, oil and gas, and marine, to name a few. The company has broad geographic coverage, a strong local presence with 12,600 employees worldwide, and posted 2010 annual sales of about SEK 24.7 billion (approx. 2.6 billion Euros). Alfa Laval’s Web site provides a critical window to the market, enabling it connect with its globally dispersed customer base. On average each month, Alfa Laval attracts up to 140,000 visitors to its Web site, serves 50,000 pages in the virtual showroom alone, and supports 12,000 – 13,000 searches.

While Alfa Laval claims customers in nearly 100 countries around the world and maintains over 24 distinct country sites, Asia accounts for 30% of its business and that impact is rapidly growing. But with its Web servers hosted in Sweden, the company found it difficult to ensure optimal performance for site visitors in distant locations. Access from Australia and China was very slow. In fact, visitors to the China site were waiting as long as 80 seconds for the home page to load, and prospects and customers were contacting local Alfa Laval offices to complain. Alfa Laval considered deploying more data centers and Web servers in Asia and the Americas. It also looked at simplifying its site pages for faster downloading. However, neither of these options proved viable. Expanding its infrastructure would have been quite expensive. Moreover, Alfa Laval didn't even know which localized site to focus on – some people based in Europe and other areas visit the China Web site because they work for a Chinese company, for example.

Astrom had heard about Akamai through the SKF Group, a company in Sweden that uses Akamai's solutions to reduce download times and improve its global site performance. Within three weeks of first talking to Akamai, Alfa Laval's site was being delivered across the global Akamai network. “We are committed to providing the tools that our prospects, customers, partners, and employees need. Akamai solutions are critical to making sure our sites and applications perform optimally," concludes Astrom.