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Golder Associates is one of the most respected engineering and environmental services groups in the world. Founded in 1960, Golder now employs over 5,000 people who operate from more than 150 offices located throughout Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America. Golder’s knowledge of local cultures, languages and regulatory requirements, combined with their global resources, makes it possible for them to help clients achieve their business objectives around the world and at home.
Through their network of local offices, Golder completed over 12,000 projects last year and has more than 6,000 clients. Services include air quality, environmental engineering, geophysics, cultural sciences, geosciences, and risk analysis. Golder is consistently ranked as one of the top engineering and environmental services firms by Engineering News Record magazine, and is considered “one of the best firms to work for” in Africa, Australia, Canada, and the US for the past 5 years.
Challenge: Enabling Collaboration for a Global Workforce
As a global corporation with many large scale projects, Golder was attuned to the challenges that their employees face in worldwide projects. Alison Ramsley, Golder’s Leader of Global IT Services noted, “We are a company of knowledge workers. For our business, the ability to put the right talent on the right project – regardless of where the person or the project might be – is exactly what helps us succeed. Our IT infrastructure is designed to support the way our engineers & scientists need to work. “Not long ago we decided that, in order to support collaboration better, we needed to deploy a centralized Intranet portal. Based on our discussion with the IT services firm Avanade, we decided to create the system based on Microsoft SharePoint. At the same time, we noticed an overall increase in our WAN data traffic as well. It wasn’t just document collaboration, even though Office docs are the bulk of what we transfer. Exchange, Veritas NetBackup, and AutoCAD files and data were demanding a tremendous amount of network resources, and slowing operations down for all our employees. We pretty quickly understood that, if we were to go to a centralized document management system, we had to do something out of the ordinary to ensure that application performance was where we needed it to be.”
Alison added, “By the nature of our work, we travel a lot. Our colleagues are on the road all the time, at client or project sites. They can be onsite anywhere from weeks to months. Soon after we started addressing the problem of performance in the branch office, we thought we should start doing the same thing for users who are on the road. After all, they need to be just as productive as users who are in the branch office.”.
Meeting the Needs of a Globally Distributed Network
Joe Potegal, Senior Network Engineer, also went into detail about Golder’s network environment. “Well, we certainly are a global company. Given that we have offices in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, Africa, Asia, and all over South America, you can imagine that maintaining consistency in connectivity and performance is difficult. It gets even harder when you think about all of the traveling workers and off-site projects we have.
“Some of our branches are just 2 – 3 employees in size, whereas others are 400 people or more. For our small offices we have T1 connectivity; our larger offices have up to DS3’s. We’re a full Cisco shop – all our core routing infrastructure is based on Cisco’s Integrated Service Routers. We run all of this with Cisco’s Dynamic Multi-Point VPN (DMVPN), so it’s fully meshed across our 150-plus offices. Whatever wide-area data services solution we chose for acceleration would have to work seamlessly with Cisco infrastructure,” noted Joe. Potegal added that Golder is also in the process of a corporate-wide voice over IP (VoIP) rollout. “Our VoIP rollout is all based on Cisco IPT. Again, any system for application acceleration would need to interoperate voice over IP.”
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