The produce-seed developer's international roots had a lot to do with IT's stature in the company.
"Seminis recognizes the importance of IT, [especially for] dealing with the complexity of diverse geographic locations," Ackerman says.
IT funding has increased, too, since Seminis went private last year. Company execs say Seminis currently has some healthy cash reserves for IT projects.
Another boost to the WAN optimization project was the return on investment. The IT team showed an ROI of less than one year compared with an all-out bandwidth upgrade. For instance, upgrading the 128-Kbps frame relay link of Seminis' Idaho site would have cost about $400 a month for a 256-Kbps pipe, Ackerman says, or $4,800 a year. A Peribit box, on the other hand, listed for around $2,900, so it was much cheaper to optimize the existing pipes. "It was easy to get this pushed through," he says.
In the first phase of the installation, Seminis focused on the compression technology--QoS wasn't yet available in the Peribit devices' software. Earlier this year, Seminis added the new QoS feature for the Peribit SR-50 and SR-20 Sequence Reducers.
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