With a group turnover in 2015 of more than 2 billion Euros, Lyreco is one of the world’s largest distributors of workplace supplies with activities in 42 countries on four continents with the alliances of strategic partners. Known for its outstanding retail experience and catalogue, in recent years Lyreco has also expanded its online store and added a new mobile app for streamlined mobile ordering and account management across all major mobile platforms.
Behind the scenes, Lyreco runs two large data centers that maintain its key development, production and internal network and applications. SAP and other critical line of business systems help it manage 58,000 orders placed and nearly 250,000 boxes delivered each day.
“We are continually evaluating network performance to ensure the highest levels of performance for our global customers,” said Laurent Dubois, Network Engineer for Lyreco Information Systems (IS) Group. “In the past we have tended to use capture tools for getting raw information about IP traffic, but it is very complicated to turn this data into insights around what is happening at the application layer.”
With a highly tuned set of server applications, Group IS teams were keen to generate more visibility but were reluctant to install any server side agents that could impact performance or require a significant level of hands-on management to maintain. After a training session, they were also able to take control of the ExtraHop solution and, by making dashboards, began to get more visibility on some applications.
“We didn’t want anything that could potentially cause any local issues. It was also important for us to select a product that could help us understand the bigger picture, allowing us to pin down the root cause of any network issues,” Laurent explained. “Partnering with Paris based ID-1 Solutions to implement ExtraHop has helped Lyreco gain this new level of visibility without compromise.”
“ExtraHop is very good at capturing and interpreting a lot of information very quickly, to easily allow us to see what is happening on our network and our applications at any given moment,” said Laurent. “Another advantage is that we can go back in time and look at any issue in more detail, and drill down through the layers of data to find a root cause, such as a performance slow down or connection issue.”
Owen Cole, EMEA Business Development VP for ExtraHop added, “For the Lyreco IS department, the ability to interpret and analyse wire data without the need for clients or additional analytics tools has proven capacity to improve IT services. As Lyreco begins its next phase of growth, ExtraHop will be a valuable tool to ensure the ability to deliver and support the best possible IT environment.”
