The company
Pilkington is one of the world's largest manufacturers of glass and glazing products for building, automotive and related technical markets. The Group has annual revenues of £2.7 billion (€4.0 billion), manufacturing operations in 24 countries on five continents and sales in 130 countries, employing around 23,900 people worldwide. Founded in 1826, Pilkington is recognized as the world's technological leader in glass.

Client requirements
In an industry with extremely high overheads, and tight margin for error, performance and availability of the data network is absolutely mission critical, whilst still being purchased at the most competitive price. As a result Pilkington required maximum availability and maximum resilience, to a number of its locations. Additionally when it came to QoS, it required maximum performance of application regardless of background traffic.

From a situation where it was managing over 10 infrastructure providers in-house locally, Pilkington wanted to reclaim control of the network and unify it under a single provider. A difficult prospect when maximum network reach under a single provider was the objective. Add to this a need to maximise efficiency and cut out unnecessary cost and the demands were steep. Other requirements included the centralization of specialist applications and SAP, as well as the integration of remote users into the network.
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