BP AMOCO

BP Amoco implements MaXCompression technology to minimize network bandwidth and transmission costs

The union of BP and Amoco in 1998 was the largest industrial merger in history and established the group as one of the world’s top three energy and petrochemicals groups. Combined revenues totaled $108 billion, with a market capitalization of $143 billion. BP Amoco is a truly global organization with oil and gas production facilities in 18 countries; 23,000 miles of pipeline; 15,500 service stations in the US and 11,500 in the rest of the world.

Establishing a platform for success

In order to address the growing communications requirements across the organization, a sophisticated messaging network infrastructure has been developed, based around Microsoft Exchange technology. As the volume of communication has increased with the growth in BP Amoco’s business groups, so the costs and availability of network bandwidth have become critical issues for the organization’s network administrators.

Like most large corporations, BP Amoco is looking to control the seemingly insatiable demand for extra capacity on its local and wide area networks. It is also trying to make the most efficient use of its existing network infrastructure to eliminate communications bottlenecks. In 1998, BP Oil in Europe began a project to examine ways in which it could minimize the growth in bandwidth required over its global wide area network (WAN), with the objective of reducing costs.

BP Amoco strikes gold

During BP Amoco’s investigations, BackOffice/e-mail service line manager, Don Kolva, based in Houston, Texas, discovered MaX Compression from C2C Systems while searching the Internet. Kolva downloaded an evaluation copy from C2C’s Web site and wanted to see how it performed over the company WAN. Thomas Petersen, e-mail domain manager for BP Oil in Europe, based in Germany, began receiving e-mail messages from Kolva with the attachments compressed.

As Petersen explains: "We immediately saw the potential of this product in reducing the size of files we e-mail over the network. Our initial testing showed that we could cut file sizes by as much as two thirds."

On this basis, it was decided to pilot MaX Compression at a number of sites in BP Amoco’s European Domain of 17 physical sites. Facilities within Microsoft Exchange were unable to identify exactly how many messages were actually sent with attachments. Having looked at a sample of sent messages, Petersen’s team worked on the assumption that one out of every ten messages would have a file attached. MaX Compression fitted well with BP Amoco’s Common Operating Environment (COE), a standard desktop based on Windows 95 and Office 95. Included in the COE is

a ZIP application – one of the options that MaX Compression uses to compress and decompress attachments. The initial trials were carried out at small sites such as 25 users in Hamburg, to larger installations like the 600 users in Rotterdam. During the pilot, FAQs (frequently asked questions) about MaX Compression were posted on the company Intranet to resolve any potential user inquiries.

BP Oil in Europe runs its current systems on high specification hardware, including Dell Pentium desktop machines and Dell and IBM laptops for mobile users. Not only does this enable efficient running of the COE applications, but it also allows for the current and future installation of powerful background applications like MaX Compression.

Roll-out fuelled by successful pilot

The pilot project showed that MaX Compression fitted well with the COE and was largely invisible to users. Moreover, it demonstrated a reduction in network traffic.

The success of the pilot convinced Petersen that MaX Compression could play a significant part in the corporate IT objective of stabilising the growth in demand for network bandwidth.

"We’re always looking for ways to improve our business processes and MaX Compression was a really good find. We were particularly impressed with how easily it was to install and set up the clients".

Over the course of about two months, MaX Compression was rolled out to nearly 10,000 users in BP Oil in Europe, across 43 Exchange servers, in all 17 sites across Europe. All the clients have the same configuration, in line with BP Amoco’s common operating platform policy. All software installation, upgrades or changes to the MaX Compression configuration can be administered centrally and distributed across the Exchange network by the domain administrator using SMS/WinInstal.

As well as noticing an immediate leveling-out of demand for bandwidth, Petersen also points out another major benefit to BP Amoco’s large community of remote users.

"Nearly 30% of our users in Europe connect into the Exchange server remotely. This means that messages with file attachments like Excel spreadsheets can take quite a long time to download. By using MaX Compression, our permanent and traveling remote users save both on time and transmission costs."

BP Amoco is planning to migrate to Microsoft Outlook clients and the latest version of Office during 1999. MaX Compression will ride the changes unaffected, since it works equally well with these upgraded applications.

Reprinted with permission from C2C Ltd.  All rights reserved.