French Retailing Giant Auchan Meets Massive Flood of Visitors With Redline Networks Secure Web I/O Acceleration

French Retailing Giant Auchan Meets Massive Flood of Visitors With Redline Networks Secure Web I/O Acceleration

Faster Site, Higher performance and reduced cost for bandwidth, servers and network infrastructure.

Paris and Campbell, Calif., November 8, 2002 — French retailing giant Auchan implemented Redline Networks' Web I/O Acceleration appliances at their online commerce site Auchandirect.fr. Auchan launched their online shopping site in March 2001 to sell books worldwide, and to offer groceries in the Paris region. Their success caused a massive flood of visitors. In order to offer a faster online experience to their customers, Auchan's technical teams began to search for a solution that would guarantee a high performance, secure site.

"Our customers spend a average of 30 minutes on our site completing purchases. We researched all of the solutions that would improve what Americans call 'the user experience'," explained Pascal Fénart, Auchan's director of technologies. "The results of our study gave us the choice between optimizing our application code or installing an appliance. Optimizing the application code would have cost us a lot of time, and provided an uncertain result. The second option, to install specialized equipment, was chosen."

Because of the secure nature of the shopping transactions (SSL), it was essential to find a product that could accelerate SSL as well as clear traffic. Auchan's technical teams researched all of the available web optimization and acceleration products on the market. Redline Networks' proved to be the only product available that accelerates SSL traffic as efficiently as clear traffic.

The benefits of the installation are clearly identifiable. "All suppliers of computer products explain that their products are easy to install and provide a quick ROI. In the case of Redline Networks, we actually were able to measure it," declared Fénart, "and it only required one or two days to define the application, to test it, to validate it and then to put it in production." For competitive reasons Auchan does not disclose their total bandwidth use, but Fénart noted that bandwidth usage of Auchandirect.fr was reduced by about 50%. Most importantly the site delivered data to end users about twice as fast.

Customers immediately saw an impressive improvement in site performance and responsiveness. Auchan has received feedback from its customers praising the site for its speed.

Auchan's technical teams noted a reduction of 50% of the load on the web servers. Auchan's 3-tier architecture (server, application servers and database servers) can now handle much more traffic. "Our traffic can therefore increase without the need for additional servers," commented Fénart. "HTTP errors practically disappeared, and that reinforces the brand image of the site."

About Auchan

In 40 years, Auchan has become one of the principal retail distribution groups in the world. Since its first store opened in Roubaix in 1961, Auchan has grown to a presence in 14 countries and employs 145,000.

About Redline Networks

Redline Networks' Web I/O Acceleration appliances enable companies to significantly accelerate download times and cut bandwidth costs while increasing the transaction capacity of their existing Web infrastructure. Deployed at sites worldwide, Redline's appliances offload I/O responsibility from web servers and caches and optimize content in real-time to speed download times and deliver radically improved performance, capacity and cost savings in the data center. Redline Networks' customers typically experience a Return on Investment (ROI) of less than three months. More information about Redline Networks and its products can be found at http://www.RedlineNetworks.com or by calling +01 408 369-3800 or toll-free in the USA at (877) 550-6420.